Vodafone Increases Observability Across the Cloud

A market leader with many moving pieces

With millions of mobile customers, Vodafone Italy knows all about connecting people. It also knows how to manage a large network of technologies and services, so their customers get the best experience possible. 

That commitment to understanding customers and their needs also extends across Vodafone’s IT infrastructure, from its databases, to its servers, to its business applications. Gaining visibility across the technology stack has become a top priority for the business as it manages a complex mix of applications and infrastructure in a hybrid-cloud environment, while modernizing its entire customer experience.

Even minor network glitches can have ramifications for Vodafone’s customers down the line. The ability to identify and resolve these issues before they snowball into major problems is paramount. This is especially true during peak periods such as a new iPhone launch, when traffic on Vodafone’s website skyrockets, or ahead of internal deadlines like quarterly financial close, when the company’s billing system must perform at a high level without failing.

"We run a large organization with many moving pieces, each of which has its own peaks and particularities," says Roberto Meo, head of IT operations. "We need a centralized view of that ecosystem to deliver the highest standards of performance, reliability, and scalability for our customers, which is why we began looking for a tool to monitor that environment."

Modernizing a multi-cloud environment

The telecommunications leader is now on a mission to improve its service quality, reduce downtime, and strengthen its application performance as part of a company-wide cloud migration. Indeed, the company has adopted a cloud-first focus across the board.

But with a complex multi-cloud environment to manage, which includes solutions from AWS, Azure, Google Cloud, and Oracle Cloud Infrastructure, Vodafone’s challenge is to maintain visibility and control over all these moving pieces.

In parallel, Vodafone continues to adopt a more data-driven approach to its customer experience, especially through its retail and web channels. The company is gradually migrating its consumer-facing services to a new digital marketplace and drawing on customers’ behavioral data to make their purchasing journeys feel more tailored and personalized.

"Every business person you meet says that customer experience is everything, but CX can also mean nothing if you treat it superficially," says Enrico Croce, IT operations specialist. "To truly understand what customers are feeling, you need to look beyond their experience and focus on what the data tells you. That’s why we’ve taken a data-driven approach to our entire IT ecosystem, from the way we manage our databases to the way we monitor and refine our customer-facing applications."

Drilling down into millions of IT transactions

Since initiating the Cisco AppDynamics solution in 2018, Vodafone centralized application monitoring for more than 30 business applications. It also added numerous databases and hundreds of servers across its IT network. The observability delivered by the Cisco AppDynamics solution allows the business to identify performance issues in near real-time, which means teams can identify the root cause of these challenges and address them quickly at the source.

"Not only does [Cisco] AppDynamics help us to manage performance issues more quickly and proactively, it gives us the end-to-end visibility we need to prioritize our performance needs," says Croce. Vodafone has used the Cisco AppDynamics solution to analyze billions of business transactions and millions of browser sessions since going live with the solution. This has helped the company identify and resolve issues with any problematic transactions.

The hours Vodafone saved in its application monitoring translated to major improvements to its customer experience. In addition, the insights it gained with the Cisco AppDynamics solution give the business firmer ground to stand on with its IT vendors. If a performance issue appears in one of its third-party software solutions, Vodafone can easily pinpoint its cause and work with the vendor to address it.

A common view of cloud development and deployments

As Vodafone started to migrate its applications to the cloud, Cisco helped to provide them a path to full-stack observability. Cisco also provided Vodafone with the Cisco Cloud Observability solution to monitor its databases, servers, and applications as the team takes a more cloud-native approach. The company has begun to shift its sales and marketing services onto a cloud-based CRM system, with Cisco helping to transition and monitor the software's performance in the new environment with Cisco Cloud Observability.

"Cloud is a core strategic investment for our business, promising new levels of scalability, innovation and cost savings while opening up new ways to develop and bring services to market," says Croce. "Cisco Cloud Observability is our Rosetta Stone, helping us to translate and migrate our applications to this new environment while maintaining the high standard of service that defines our business."

The goal for Vodafone is to aggregate all the data from its cloud solutions into a common view, gaining visibility of all its applications and cloud deployments in a single location. The team is working closely with Cisco Professional Services to achieve full-stack observability.

"Cisco Professional Services are pros at application monitoring and business transformation. The level of insight and guidance they provide surpassed our expectations at every turn, giving us the confidence that our cloud transformation is in good hands," says Meo.

A central console to govern application performance

Vodafone continues to gain more visibility and control over its operations as it adds new applications, servers, and databases with the Cisco AppDynamics solution. The granular performance gains the solution makes to its IT lead to major improvements in the speed and cost of its operations, and to the quality of its customer experience. "Working with Cisco is like having one big console from which you can control every key element of your operations," says Meo.

"A KPI is just a number, but with Cisco Full-Stack Observability you also get the context and history of that number so you can understand the moving parts behind it," says Meo. "That's what makes the solution so valuable. You can treat problems at the source, not just manage its symptoms on the front end."

Driving adoption and cultural change

Vodafone's transformation is more than a technology story. The company has undergone a complete cultural shift, empowering its employees to take advantage of its cloud-based applications and services to improve the way they work each day.

Employee training is a major driver of this cultural shift, helping to boost Cisco Cloud Observability adoption by 40 percent since Vodafone first began using the solution. This figure doesn't just represent improvements to its application performance and operations since going live. It also shows the value of the full-stack observability that Cisco delivers in a large and multi-faceted IT organization. 

"It's amazing how smoothly a business runs when everyone has access to the same detailed information," says Croce. "Teams speak the same language, align their priorities, and collaborate in ways that yield surprising positive outcomes for their customers, their teams, and Vodafone as a whole."