By John Zipperer

It's a basic tenet of business: If customers experience too many problems doing business with you, they'll go elsewhere. Today, ensuring smooth customer interactions is more challenging than ever. Customers are increasingly served online, and many customer services are delivered through service-oriented architectures (SOAs) of Web-enabled applications and Web services. While SOAs can improve the speed of transactions, problems become noticeable to customers more quickly, too.

Just ask the IT staff at retailer The Kroger Co. Two years ago, the $70.2 billion company suffered from underperforming product searches and displays on one of its online stores, recounts Darrell Sandefur, a Solutions Architect at Kroger. To remedy the situation, Kroger implemented CA Wily Introscope®, an Application Performance Management (APM) solution. This helped Sandefur and his team identify the source of the problem: A slow-performing SQL statement was being called about two dozen times for each page. With this information, Sandefur was able to go 13 layers deep into the transaction—stretching from the URL to the database — to fix the problem. The faulty SQL statement was reworked, and search times were cut nearly in half, according to Sandefur.

This dramatic improvement helps Kroger — which counts grocery stores, convenience shops and jewelry stores among its many retail outlets — meet its goals of increasing repeat visits and keeping shoppers on the site for long periods of time. Kroger also uses the APM solution to troubleshoot and fine-tune a wide range of systems, including HR and labor-management applications. The APM solution also provides Kroger with reports on tens of thousands of metrics, including CPU measures and RAM usage.