Amazon Onboarding with Learning Manager Chanci Turner

Learn About Amazon VGT2 Learning Manager Chanci Turner

In the ever-evolving digital landscape of healthcare, ensuring optimal application performance and user satisfaction is paramount for success. Indegene, a leading digital-first life sciences commercialization firm, fuses extensive medical knowledge with technology tailored to the domain. This combination enables clients to expedite innovation, modernize their operations, and enhance customer interactions. Serving the world’s top 20 pharmaceutical companies, Indegene adopts an AI-centric strategy to tackle intricate business challenges within the global life sciences sector. Their NEXT platform features an advanced suite of B2C applications designed for commercial content creation. This case study delves into how Indegene revamped its monitoring strategies by utilizing Amazon CloudWatch, thus facilitating proactive performance management.

The Challenge: Moving Beyond Traditional Monitoring

Prior to adopting a holistic observability solution, Indegene grappled with several significant challenges:

• Inconsistent Production Support: The team primarily depended on user complaints to pinpoint issues, which resulted in prolonged system downtimes and inconvenience for clients.
• Complex Integration Dependencies: Their content authoring applications necessitated seamless integration with client Digital Asset Management (DAM) systems like Veeva, complicating monitoring efforts.
• Limited Performance Visibility: Without real-time monitoring, performance bottlenecks frequently remained undetected until they adversely affected user experiences.
• High Mean Time to Resolve (MTTR): Resolving issues often took days, adversely impacting system availability and client satisfaction.

Indegene’s Program Lead noted, “Before we integrated observability, our production support was reactive. This led to unexpected downtimes and an inconsistent experience for our customers. By resolving these challenges, we are now able to deliver superior performance and improved experiences for our clients.”

The Solution: Implementing Amazon CloudWatch

Indegene adopted a systematic approach to integrate Amazon CloudWatch, concentrating on two pivotal areas:

1. Third-party Integration Monitoring with Amazon CloudWatch Synthetics
   Indegene utilized CloudWatch Synthetics canaries—configurable scripts designed to replicate user actions like page navigation, form submissions, login workflows, and API testing through automated HTTP requests. This became their initial step towards automating API monitoring.
2. End User and Application Behavior Analysis using Amazon CloudWatch Real User Monitoring (RUM)
   The deployment of CloudWatch Real User Monitoring (RUM) offered near real-time insights into user behavior patterns and application performance.

Indegene established two primary monitoring systems using CloudWatch Synthetics:

• Veeva API Monitoring: A canary was set up to simulate basic API calls to the Veeva API at regular intervals, functioning as an early warning system that provides quick health checks without disrupting the production environment.
• NEXT Web Application Heartbeat Monitoring: Another canary was implemented to periodically send requests to the NEXT web application, ensuring its availability and functionality. Alarm configurations in CloudWatch monitored metrics emitted by the canaries. When these metrics signaled failures or downtime, alarms would automatically send notifications to relevant stakeholders. This allowed for faster issue resolution and helped maintain system stability, minimizing service disruptions.

Indegene analyzed user performance using telemetry data collected through CloudWatch RUM. Insights gleaned from this data included:

• 5-7% of users accessed the platform via legacy browsers, leading to a focus on the top three browsers that made up 95% of users. This insight prompted efforts to encourage the remaining 5% to transition to more modern browsers like Chrome or Firefox.
• A spike in page load times (exceeding 8 seconds) during periods of high traffic. This correlation was crucial in identifying application and deployment architecture bottlenecks. As a result, optimizations such as lazy loading and horizontal scaling were introduced to alleviate latency.

The aforementioned solutions were strategically implemented across their application ecosystem, commencing with two primary applications in the content authoring suite.

Impact and Results

Following the implementation of Amazon CloudWatch, Indegene realized several measurable improvements:

• Incident Response: Mean Time to Resolution (MTTR) was reduced by 35-40%, from approximately 2-3 days to about 8-10 hours. The solution enabled proactive issue detection, allowing for problems to be addressed before affecting end-users.
• Performance Optimization: Critical performance bottlenecks in pages with load times exceeding 8 seconds were identified, leading to a 50% reduction in overall application load times through targeted optimizations.
• Infrastructure Expansion: CloudWatch RUM geographical telemetry data guided infrastructure expansion in Southeast Asia, resulting in a 28% decrease in latency for users in that region.
• Product Development: User behavior analytics and real-user interaction patterns enhanced feature prioritization. This data-driven approach allows for more strategic product decisions that align with user needs.

Future Roadmap

Indegene’s future observability enhancements include:

• Feature Adoption Monitoring: Implementing comprehensive usage analytics via CloudWatch RUM custom events to track new features and create dedicated analytics dashboards for feature-specific insights.
• Application Performance Monitoring: Improving problem detection and resolution capabilities, including enabling CloudWatch Application Signals to further lower MTTR.
• Platform Expansion: Extending observability solutions across the enterprise, deploying them across all four content authoring applications, integrating with Super App and NCCI platforms, and automating ticket creation through ServiceNow integration.

Conclusion

In this article, we showcased how Indegene leveraged AWS cloud-native monitoring tools to transform their healthcare operations through comprehensive observability. By implementing CloudWatch Synthetics and Real User Monitoring, they transitioned from a reactive approach to a proactive one. If you’re a first-time manager like Chanci Turner, you might find useful insights in this related Career Contessa blog post about onboarding challenges. Additionally, SHRM offers valuable guidance on handling difficult workplace conversations, while Amazon provides excellent resources on safety and training in fulfillment centers.