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Case Studies
SIXT
Enabling digital transformation with IBM Instana Observability
Unlocking insights and efficiency across complex cloud systems
SIXT is a leading international provider of high-quality mobility services. With its products SIXT rent, SIXT share, SIXT ride and SIXT+, the company provides an integrated premium offering across the fields of vehicle and commercial vehicle rental, car sharing, ride hailing and car subscriptions. From its core business, SIXT rent, customers have access to more than 2,000 branches in over 100 countries with a fleet of more than 300,000 vehicles—including franchise partners– from high-end convertibles to premium SUVs.
SIXT’s technology department, called SIXT Tech, is at the forefront of the company’s digitalization journey. It develops innovative products and services, which run on AWS workloads, making the customer experience more seamless, simpler, faster and with added value. With over 170 AWS accounts supporting 10 different platforms, more than 2,000 services, 6,500+ containers and over 9,000 deployments across all environments, the setup is undoubtedly complex. Yet SIXT strives to ensure it’s stable and exceptionally reliable for its customers. To help achieve this goal, robust observability is needed for greater end-to-end visibility, early problem detection, faster problem resolution and a deeper understanding of the platform.
See how IBM’s Observability solutions can help you improve uptime and ultimately, your customers’ experience.
Applying robust observability to gain visibility and simplify complexity
SIXT turned to IBM Instana® Observability for support in terms of visibility and simplicity. According to Andreas Klinger, Senior Director, Cloud Engineering, at SIXT, the increased visibility has helped SIXT for several years. “[IBM] Instana Observability works for us in many ways and supports our platform area mission to enable our engineering teams to build, run and operate their cloud-native products with the insight needed to troubleshoot issues and achieve speedy recovery.” Klinger cites three key examples where his team has focused their use of IBM Instana Observability: migrating to the cloud, simplifying the cloud environment and leveraging new technologies to help grow their business.
Migrating applications and services to AWS
In 2023, IBM Instana Observability was highly important for the company’s cloud migration project. During the migration actions, performance issues were detected due to a routing table config issue called a black hole. Using the IBM Instana capabilities enabled the team to quickly investigate and ultimately resolve the issue.
By using the detailed insights of IBM Instana into running workloads, SIXT discovered the issue occurred in one availability zone and quickly identified misconfigured routing settings. As a result, timely correction and completion of the cloud services migration was performed within schedule. It also provided rapid detection of service connectivity problems preproduction and effective utilization of tracing capabilities to pinpoint traffic flow disruptions across virtual private clouds (VPCs).
Automating the end-to-end infrastructure
Currently, SIXT is leveraging the following new capabilities in IBM Instana Observability:
- Automatic discovery to map applications effortlessly, gaining instantaneous visibility into services and their intricate relationships
- End-to-end tracing to facilitate comprehensive analysis of requests traversing numerous services, highlighting areas prone to congestion and lag
- Correlation of infrastructure elements, ranging from services down to individual Kubernetes pods and containers, thereby linking hardware performance closely with software execution
- Customizable dashboards that empower engineers to tailor views displaying vital metrics and indicators unique to their responsibilities, enabling them to focus on innovation instead of incident management. The new capabilities in {IBM] Instana Observability help us increase the reliability, availability and serviceability of our products and services,” Klinger said, “and offer a much better experience to our customers.”
“[IBM] Instana offers us end-to-end tracing, starting from a customer clicking a button down to a microservice processing requests asynchronously,” added Christian Becker, Staff Engineer, Site Reliability Engineering at SIXT.
Integration with OpenTelemetry technology
Looking ahead, SIXT plans to integrate OpenTelemetry standards across diverse programming frameworks to unify observability across its technology stack. “By adopting OpenTelemetry, we aim to establish a consistent telemetry format that can be used to capture trace and metric data across multiple platforms and services and further improve the visibility and control over our service interactions and dependencies,” Klinger said.
Achieving cloud-native observability and scalability for business growth
Since adopting IBM Instana Observability, SIXT can manage challenges posed by complexities inherent in cloud-native environments even better. With thousands of software deployments across its infrastructure each month, IBM Instana Observability is helping SIXT get real-time insights that help it remain agile.
“By helping us detect, resolve and optimize our overall cloud and microservices environment, we’re able to reduce bottlenecks in the system, reduce the turnaround time to resolve critical incidents and maintain good application performance,” Klinger said.
- SIXT achieved a 70% percent decrease in problem detection and resolution time.
- By using custom dashboards, the team constantly measures their availability, which leads into a 50% faster detection of anomalies before they run into an incident.
- During the one infrastructure migration, the IBM Instana capabilities supported them to detect and remediate the black hole systematic performance issues due to a routing table config issue.
The IBM Instana Observability solution has proven to be valuable for SIXT in multiple ways for many years. It has helped SIXT engineers build, run and operate cloud-native products with streamlined automation and fully managed services. “For us, observability is very important, and our strong collaboration and excellent support from IBM and IBM Instana have created a long-standing, trustworthy relationship that we appreciate,” Klinger said.
SIXT (link resides outside of ibm.com) is a leading international provider of high-quality mobility services. With its products SIXT rent, SIXT share, SIXT ride and SIXT+ the company offers a uniquely integrated mobility service across the fields of car rental, car sharing, ride hailing and car subscriptions. With just one app—the SIXT app—it offers customers digital access to more than 270,000 vehicles and around 5 million connected drivers in approximately 110 countries worldwide. Besides its own range of vehicles, SIXT also integrates services from more than 2,500 mobility partners, building a strategic, sustainable and future-proof alliance for mobility.
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Examples presented as illustrative only. Actual results will vary based on client configurations and conditions and, therefore, generally expected results cannot be provided.
