Finding the needle in the haystack: the error in a million lines of code
With an order entry system that uses nearly a million lines of code, about 350 different applications in multiple languages and several thousand ASP pages, a site as complex as Crutchfield.com faces the possibility of application interaction trouble every day – that goes for the internally facing system used by Crutchfield call center agents too, says CIO Steve Weiskircher. But Crutchfield can now shrink the time needed to uncover and diagnose such errors with software that can do the job.
Crutchfield recently acquired the AppSight Black Box from Identify Software, which captures a real-time log of user actions, system events, performance metrics and other site operations data. That allows IT staff to simply replay a sequence of events leading to a problem that shows up on the screen, rather than having to re-create it.
Crutchfield has tapped the software, for example, to find the source of a slow-down within an internally written application that was designed to shop rates at outside carriers for labeled packages awaiting outgoing shipment. The Black Box identified the time associated with each programmatic element of the application and revealed the location of the bottleneck: internal servers that weren’t up to supporting the new rate-shopping application.
Crutchfield resolved the issue by boosting server capacity, an upgrade that already was in the works. “The real benefit of the troubleshooting software in this case was in the time it shaved off finding the problem,” Weiskircher says: minutes, compared with hours it may have taken for IT staff to retrieve the same information by looking for it in the source code, testing and re-testing the application.
The tool also reduced the implementation time required to migrate all its applications to an upgraded version of Windows XP, a potentially challenging switch as new security features of the upgrade could have blocked the action of some components and caused application failure or delay. Since most of Crutchfield’s applications are custom and internally written, they’d never been tried on the upgraded platform. The software trimmed the application validation process for the contact center system on the new platform from an estimated several months to one month, Weiskircher says.
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