Based in San Francisco, AppDynamics began as a global application monitoring service in 2008. Teams within the company operated as startups within a startup. When faced with challenges, individual teams created custom solutions in order to “make the digital world work”.
As AppDynamics grew to 2000+ employees, they needed to update their processes and systems to meet the business’s goals. Since teams operated independently within the company, there was a lack of transparency between these groups. They needed a collaborative and integrated solution.
Delivering seamless, agile service with Jira Service Desk
Before Jira Service Desk, AppDynamics used Jira Software as a service desk to provide IT support. As the company grew, AppDynamics saw the need for a user-friendly service desk experience for both employees and clients.
Jira Service Desk was a natural choice for the company, and made company operations smoother. Easy integration with Jira Software allowed teams to connect to tools that were already being used. A lower price point, along with easier deployment, helped AppDynamics meet their service requirements. Internal experts in the company who had the knowledge to deploy and maintain Jira Service Desk helped smooth the process.
AppDynamics has found that Jira Service Desk quickly solves problems with transparency and standardizes operations as the company grows. The company maintains a DevOps culture while using ITSM best practices which has allowed them to be flexible to adapt to arising needs.
Scaling up
Over time, Alex and Jeff’s team scaled Jira Service Desk to teams outside of IT across the company. Teams such as HR, Facilities, and Procurement realized that a dedicated service desk was valuable to managing their own requests and supporting the growth of the organization. User enablement training is a priority to ensure that employees are familiar with the tools, ITSM best practices, and underutilized features.
After introducing Jira Service Desk, Alex led training sessions and shared documented processes within Confluence. Dedicated Slack channels were used to answer questions about Atlassian products, and to direct employees to open tickets in the new customer portal. When other teams ask them for a new tool to purchase, they first understand the problem, then focus on finding a way to solve it with a more user-friendly solution.
Increasing uptime with data center
When Jeff and Alex joined AppDynamics, the company was approaching the user limit for their Jira Cloud instance, surpassed their storage capacities for Jira and Confluence, and had a significant amount of REST API calls and third party add-ons. The company experienced an infrastructure crash nearly every day.
Enter Atlassian’s Data Center. As a self-managed deployment option with the ability to run on several nodes, AppDynamics was in for an upgrade. The team migrated their data to a two-node data stack, and even developed an automated way to create a Jira stack in seven minutes, making the scaling process more efficient.
Now with Jira Service Desk Data Center, they can always access their service desk and upgrades have no downtime.
Transparency in the work environment
Jeff and Alex created a product idea intake portal using a combination of a Jira Service Desk project and a Jira Software product. The portal allows stakeholders to submit their ideas through a Service Desk form, then creates a ticket in that Service Desk project, which copies it into a software project. There, it is visible to multiple teams.
Using Atlassian products, Jeff and Alex were able to help the business be flexible as it grows. For always evolving companies, adaptability and scalability are crucial for “making the digital world work” for teams and clients.
To learn more about AppDynamics’ experience with Jira Service Desk, visit this page, or watch our Jira Service Desk webinar!