Pearson is the leader in global education and has been going through two large transformations. From print to digital publisher and from a federated to centralized business model. A centralized business model has brought together many different processes, technologies and tech stacks. This created challenges around scalability and stability within our environments and communications to internal and external stakeholders. Pearson presented their story at AppSphere 2015. Learn how AppDynamics helped Pearson prepare for failure by: - Enabling Pearson to be more proactive in our environments by instrumenting our business transactions across multiple complex systems and anticipating problems before our users were affected. - Feeding our AppDynamics data into a Pearson built dashboard for better status and communications to our stakeholders. - How Pearson was able to substantially reduce the number of P1 and P2 incidents over previous high usage time periods. - Tangibly Improved customer experience including NPS score during Back to school timeframe. - Significantly changed end user expectations by significantly reducing our MTTR.

1. Preparing for System Failure:
How Pearson used AppDynamics to Drive Improved Student Experience
Mike Jackson, VP of Software Engineering, Pearson
Tim Boberg, Sr. Manager of Application Engineering & DevOps, Pearson

2. Pearson is the world’s leading learning company
40,000 employees in over 70 countries
All working to help people of all ages to make measurable progress in their lives
through all kinds of learning
We provide learning materials, technologies, assessments and services to teachers
and students in order to help people everywhere aim higher and fulfill their
potential.
We put the learner at the center of everything we do.
Who is Pearson?

3. Who is Pearson?
Pearson is the world’s leading learning company
40,000 employees in over 70 countries
All working to help people of all ages to make measurable progress in their lives
through all kinds of learning
We provide learning materials, technologies, assessments and services to teachers
and students in order to help people everywhere aim higher and fulfill their
potential.
We put the learner at the center of everything we do.

4. The role of technology in education is expanding
87%
of parents say
effective implementation of technology is
important for
their child’s success
Source: EdTechReview 2013
6.7m
students are now taking
at least one online course
Source: Online Learning Consortium 2012
92%
of educators rely on
internet content in the classroom
Source: Tomorrow Project – Speak up survey 2013

5. Helping people make progress in their lives through learning
PEARSON DIGITAL TRANSFORMATION

6. 6
Digital Applications at Pearson

7. Multiple platforms with disparate technology stacks
- Microsoft, Oracle, NoSQL
- .Net, Java, Opensource
Pearson Apps – XL Platform Only
Copyright © 2015 AppDynamics. All rights reserved. 7
1B+
Pageview
s
Over 2
months
1.3M
Daily
Logins
40K
Concurren
t users

8. 8
Example App - MathXL

9. 9

10. Preparing for system failure
“Enterprise software must be cynical. Cynical
software expects bad things to happen and is never
surprised when they do.”
Release It! Design and Deploy Production-Ready Software
by Michael T Nygard
Copyright © 2015 AppDynamics. All rights reserved.10

11. 11
Failure to prepare
is preparing to fail

12. Surviving a failure - Think before you fail
Copyright © 2015 AppDynamics. All rights reserved.12
“A resilient system keeps processing transactions, even when there
are transient impulses, persistent stresses, or component failures
disrupting normal processing”
“A highly stable design usually costs the same to implement as the
unstable one.”
- Release It! Design and Deploy Production-Ready Software by
Michael T Nygard

13. The Exceptional Fall
13

14. The Monitoring Story
Copyright © 2015 AppDynamics. All rights reserved. 14

15. The Monitoring Story
Copyright © 2015 AppDynamics. All rights reserved. 15

16. Why AppDynamics?
- One ubiquitous tool that handles our disparate tech stacks
- Scalable Architecture
- We love all of the AppDynamics features:
- System level monitoring and alerting
- Business transaction monitoring and alerting
- Call Stack visibility for slow or failing health checks
- Visual representation of system
16
Even VP’s can use it !!

17. Partnership between Pearson and AppDynamics
Copyright © 2015 AppDynamics. All rights reserved. 17

18. Preparing for the Exceptional Fall
18
“AppDynamics turns our application into a living, breathing entity”
Pearson
Software
Engineer

19. Preparing for the Exceptional Fall
19

20. Copyright © 2015 AppDynamics. All rights reserved. 20
Exceptional Results with AppDynamics

21. Preparing for success!!!
21
● Establish CoE
○ Engage AppD Professional Services
○ Ongoing Hands on Training
● Organize your applications
● Instrument key business transactions
● Eyes On The Glass – Watch Production
● Action what you see
○ If you see it, say it
● Continuous improvement
○ Keep current on controller and agent
○ Evaluate key systems and transactions

22. Next Steps with AppDynamics & our initiative
Copyright © 2015 AppDynamics. All rights reserved. 22

23. Takeaways
• Success at scale requires standardization and preparation
• Systems fail, Implement Stability Patterns
• Adopt and Implement vibrant full stack Monitoring
• Watch and Learn from Production
• Avoid silos, work cross functionally
• Train First Responders and DevOps Teams
Copyright © 2015 AppDynamics. All rights reserved. 23

24. Thank You

25. Agenda
Pearson Overview
Preparing for system failure
Surviving a system failure
The Exceptional Fall
Results
Takeaways
Copyright © 2015 AppDynamics. All rights reserved. 25

26. Preparing for system failure
“It is a fantasy to expect every single bug to be driven
out. Bugs will happen. They cannot be eliminated, so
they must be survived instead.”
- Release It! Design and Deploy Production-Ready Software by
Michael T Nygard
Copyright © 2015 AppDynamics. All rights reserved. 26

27. Surviving a failure: Think before you fail
Memory: You can never have enough
Users consume resources
Common logging tools create objects to represent a log
event. These objects require memory. If no memory is
available to create a log event, these logs do not get created
This is a great argument for external monitoring in addition to
log file scrapping
27

28. 28

29. - Over 1 billion pageviews since September 1
- Over 1.3m daily logins
- Over 40k concurrent users during peak
- For the XL Platform ALONE
- Multiple platforms with disparate technology stacks
- Microsoft, Oracle, NoSQL
- .Net, Java, Opensource
Pearson - few stats...
Copyright © 2015 AppDynamics. All rights reserved. 29