Staying on track with AI-enhanced application monitoring

Across the rail industry, passengers are increasingly reliant on online services to plan journeys and book tickets. Srbijavoz, Serbia’s national passenger rail company, developed a bespoke in-house ticketing system to make travel more convenient than ever. Through Srbijavoz’s website or mobile app, customers can buy train tickets for national and international routes and receive real-time journey updates.

To enable this range of functionality, the system is supported by a large, complex network of servers and databases. As rail infrastructure in Serbia expands and new high-speed railway lines open, Srbijavoz has seen a surge in customer numbers, from 2.6 million to over 7 million in just two years. This rapid growth placed extreme pressure on the ticketing system, causing prolonged downtime and risking customer dissatisfaction.

“Our ticketing system needs to run 24x7, because when we’re not selling tickets, we’re losing out on revenue,” says Zoran Stevanovic, IT Project Manager at Srbijavoz. Stevanovic explains the pitfalls of their previous system: “We would regularly experience up to five hours of downtime in production. With such a huge and dynamic system, my team had to spend hours searching for the root of the problem before we could even start working on a solution.”

Srbijavoz sought an application monitoring solution that would help the IT team get to the source of problems quicker, keeping the ticketing system available around the clock.

After a thorough market review, Srbijavoz chose to collaborate with IBM Gold Business Partner Ibis Solutions. Together, they deployed IBM® Instana® as the railway’s application observability solution.

“We took the selection process slowly to make sure that we made the right decision,” recalls Stevanovic. “Ibis have been incredibly patient with us throughout, and were always a phone call away. My team and theirs became like one joint unit.”

Working closely with their trusted partner, Srbijavoz deployed IBM® Instana® in just 30 days across the entire ticketing system stack, including web applications, IIS and several databases. With AI-enriched monitoring from Instana, Srbijavoz now receives instant notifications for issues, such as slow API calls or failed database queries.

With Instana, the Srbijavoz IT team can now quickly identify and resolve several issues across both the frontend and backend of the business-critical ticketing system. For example, when mobile app users reported login issues, the support team quickly pinpointed that the cause was unsupported special characters in passwords. Thanks to the real-time insights offered by Instana, the development team identified the issue in just a few clicks, swiftly restoring access and improving the user experience.

On another occasion, users reported sluggish performance on a critical web application. Using Instana, the team immediately discovered that the slowdown was linked to performance issues in the underlying Oracle database. By analyzing the slow queries identified by Instana, the team implemented targeted indexing of specific database fields. As a result, query execution times dropped significantly, and web performance returned to optimal levels, delivering a seamless experience for users.

For Srbijavoz’s lean IT team of ten people, Instana has freed up a significant amount of time, allowing them to focus on developing innovative digital customer experiences. “Having IBM Instana is like having an extra player on the team,” confirms Stevanovic.

Most significantly, proactive monitoring and quick issue resolution have helped Srbijavoz eliminate downtime for their ticketing system, keeping passengers informed 24x7. “In the year since deploying IBM Instana, we haven’t had a single minute of downtime,” says Stevanovic.

As Srbijavoz continues to drive service improvements, they plan to work with Ibis to deploy Instana across their hybrid cloud IT infrastructure, including their SAP environment and Amazon Machine Images within AWS. “We are always learning and gathering deeper expertise on IBM Instana, and see much more potential for it within Srbijavoz,” concludes Stevanovic.

With over 140 years of history, Srbijavoz (link resides outside of ibm.com) is the national passenger railway company in Serbia. The company operates intercity, regional and international trains, and serves over 7 million passangers annually.

Part of the Ibis Group, Ibis Solutions (link resides outside of ibm.com)is a leading provider of IT solutions in Southeast Europe, helping businesses thrive in the digital era.