Technology

Ticketek analytics overhaul aids Commonwealth Games launch

Ticketek, the Australian ticketing giant, says that the overhaul of its application performance management (APM) tools allowed it to make a success of the launch of ticket sales for Commonwealth Games 2018.

The operator, which is responsible for selling 1.5m for next year’s Gold Coast event, has rolled out an APM system from AppDynamics across its entire technology team.

Matt Cudworth, chief technology officer at parent company TEG, told the ZDNet website that a review was commissioned to improve performance and monitoring tools, which while working well at a technical and infrastructure level, were restricting access to analytics information.

As part of its Ticketek technology platform transformation project, the company headed to the market to find a better way to unify its APM tools.

Gaining better insights

Its two priorities were gaining better insights into the ‘real world’ performance of its systems, and bringing all data together to aid the quality assurance, operations and executive business teams.

Cudworth said: “One of the key benefits Ticketek wanted to achieve was code-level instrumentation to enable the development and quality assurance team to make informed decisions based on empirical evidence of suitability for a large scale.”

He said the company’s new APM toolset has already proved its strength by handling the launch of Commonwealth Games tickets in April.

“Four years ago for the Glasgow Games at the same stage, the ticketing portal had a major loss of service that lasted days,” Cudworth said.

“The Gold Coast portal, powered by Ticketek, processed requests every minute of the day. We were very satisfied with the outcome and the meticulous preparations that went into this effort, but crucially the AppDynamics tools gave us the ability to evaluate the performance and monitoring of our systems. ”

Cudworth told ZDNet that the primary focus of the organisation is to build out the level of management of Ticketek websites, with new mobile apps in the pipeline that will be built from the start with AppDynamics instrumentation.