Achieving performance and order management excellence during Black Friday with full-stack observability

When it is Black Friday and many of the world’s top retailers rely on your solution to conduct their business, your solution better perform. During the 2024 holiday season, the IBM Sterling® Order Management software (OMS) team used the IBM Instana® Observability solution to maintain excellent performance and help smash order and revenue records.

The SaaS version of IBM Sterling OMS facilitates real-time order and inventory management for many brands that are household names in the US and internationally, from massive online marketplaces to popular shops for fashion apparel and children’s gifts. For these companies, if the OMS system falters, even for a minute, it is money lost; during Black Friday or other seasonal peaks, it could be millions.

The Sterling OMS team at IBM understands what is at stake, and it commits to a service-level agreement (SLA) of 99.9999% uptime for customers. But making good on this SLA is no simple task.

IBM Sterling OMS SaaS technology stack

• Database components: IBM® Db2®, NoSQL, Cassandra, MongoDB, Elastic Search
• Messaging: IBM MQ, Kafka
• Software defined networking (SDN): Istio Service Mesh
• Apache Spark and Iceberg Data Lakehouse to support AI workloads
• 20+ IBM Cloud® Kubernetes Service clusters, 900+ worker nodes, 60,000 active containers
• Large Language Model (LLM) AI use cases to enhance services for call centers

The OMS SaaS product suite supports over 400 customizable environments, incorporating a diverse array of multi-tenant microservices that scale both horizontally and vertically. “To ensure customers can run real-time eCommerce workloads seamlessly,” says Sachin Sethiya, Program Director of Order Management and Development at IBM, “each environment and microservice must maintain high availability and reliability. Monitoring such a complex system—featuring hundreds of inbound and outbound integrations—is a significant challenge.” To tackle this, OMS leveraged Instana to deliver comprehensive observability for each integration and touchpoint.

The Sterling OMS team initiated migration from a competitive observability solution to Instana for its monitoring needs in mid-2023. This transition was driven by the need for enhanced observability and cost efficiency. The migration was completed before the 2024 holiday season, enabling the OMS team to fully leverage Instana's capabilities during this critical period.

The migration to Instana provided Sterling OMS with significant value, especially during the high-demand 2024 holiday season:

• Enhanced Observability: Instana provided the OMS team with real-time visibility into the system's performance, allowing them to proactively identify and resolve issues. This was crucial during the holiday season, when order volumes surged by nearly 4.5 times their normal rates, processing over 42 million order lines.¹
• Resilience at Scale: The OMS team successfully navigated the 2024 holiday season — a peak period for retail workloads — without performance degradation. This demonstrated Instana's ability to handle high-scale environments with reliability. Instana facilitated a seamless experience even with the system handling a load of 6 billion API calls in a week. Most API calls had a response time in sub-seconds.²
• AI-Powered Optimization: During the 2024 holiday surge, 25 million order lines were optimized by the Sterling OMS AI engine.³ This means that the AI engine, using real-time demand signals and inventory level predictions, determined the most profitable paths to source and fulfill those orders. This optimization leads to higher profitability for retailers using Sterling OMS.

The 2024 holiday season stands as a testament to the transformative power of Sterling OMS enhanced by IBM Instana's Observability. During peak shopping periods, particularly around Black Friday, the system effortlessly handled a tremendous amount of order volumes and API calls that dwarfed typical daily averages. Instana's real-time monitoring processed inventory transactions at unprecedented speeds, delivering the split-second accuracy modern shoppers demand. The platform's AI engine optimized millions of order decisions, demonstrating how intelligent automation can simultaneously drive scale and profitability. This exceptional performance translated directly to the bottom line – enabling retailers to deliver on their holiday commitments while prioritizing healthy margins. As digital commerce continues to evolve, the Sterling OMS-Instana integration has proven itself to be more than just a technology upgrade; it's a strategic advantage that positions retailers to thrive in an increasingly demanding retail landscape.