60 2013 Issue 02 | dell.com/powersolutions

Customer perspective | Focus on software

or checking out,” says Maxwell. “Foglight identified

user sessions which had performance problems in

the checkout click stream, as well as the underlying

code which was causing the issue. We were able to

quickly identify the core problem: A couple of class

files were set up incorrectly. We fixed those files, and

we haven’t had that database issue again.”

Wet Seal believes Foglight will provide a return

on investment (ROI) within two years. “Website

outages are quite expensive for us,” says Maxwell.

“The company not only loses sales from customers

who are unable to access the site, it also incurs

significant costs through reduced employee

productivity. By preventing website outages, Foglight

will more than pay for itself.”

Adding to the expected ROI is enhanced website

performance. “Management has tasked us with

delivering faster page load times, which we couldn’t

Wet Seal, Inc., is a leading specialty retailer of fashionable,

contemporary apparel and accessories, with two ecommerce

sites that account for a significant portion of the company’s

revenue. “Several years ago, website performance did not get the

attention it does today,” says Greg Maxwell, ecommerce development manager at

Wet Seal. “But with the significant growth of ecommerce, performance problems

in our web applications now demand immediate attention. To compete in today’s

market, we need to keep our websites running at peak performance.”

The company needed expanded insight into its web applications to easily

find and resolve performance problems. Existing tools gave a very limited view

of the visitor experience and did not allow for proactive application performance

monitoring. “For example, if a page was really slow, but it was working, it

wouldn’t trip an alarm,” says Maxwell.

The Wet Seal customer service department addressed website issues

when end users called to report problems. Many customer issues, however,

were difficult to reproduce. Although the company was able to identify some

web performance problems through load testing, it needed a better method

to detect unanticipated problems that could potentially compromise the

customer experience.

The company’s application vendor recommended Foglight software from Dell.

Foglight is designed to provide a comprehensive view of the application, from the

business services layer to the supporting infrastructure components, allowing IT

management to identify urgent problems and their causes. Moreover, Foglight

enables administrators to zero in on user experiences that do not meet predefined

service levels and see exactly what these users experienced by replaying the

relevant web sessions.

Accelerating problem diagnosis and resolution

“Through our existing Dell™ database solutions, we knew a problem with the

database back end was preventing some users from adding items to their baskets

To improve the online shopping experience for its

customers, Wet Seal deploys Foglight™ application

monitoring software from Dell to quickly identify and

resolve performance problems.

Wet Seal

Shining the light on performance

Reprinted from Dell Power Solutions, 2013 Issue 2. Copyright © 2013 Dell Inc. All rights reserved.

dell.com/powersolutions | 2013 Issue 02 61

Customer perspective | Focus on software

deliver before we had Foglight, but now

we can,” says Maxwell. “Having a snappier

site will enable us to convert more website

visitors into customers.”

Smooth performance is especially

important for popular technologies such as

smartphone apps. “We didn’t really know

how well our smartphone app was doing

or whether our data feed to Facebook was

running correctly,” Maxwell says. “That’s

critical, because when your Facebook

game isn’t running correctly, you aren’t

going to call Wet Seal customer service;

you’re just never going to play the game

again. We have the visibility we need

to prevent problems from affecting our

Facebook and smartphone users because

we use Foglight.”

Because the company competes

against other retail giants, it’s essential

that IT staff know whether the website

is delivering pages quickly and correctly.

“There are a lot of monitoring tools that

can tell you if you’re delivering a page in

2 seconds, which is average,” Maxwell

explains. “But these tools won’t tell you

that for 10 percent of your customers, it’s

taking 10 seconds. Having a tool that can

quickly find those outliers will give us a big

competitive advantage.”

Enhancing productivity

The Wet Seal IT staff has saved 40 hours of

programming time weekly by streamlining

troubleshooting and proactively

approaching application performance

management. “Our development staff used

to spend a fair amount of time helping to

identify and diagnose problems,” says

Maxwell. “We can turn that responsibility

over to the network staff now with

Foglight. That extra savings has resulted in

our applications getting into production

faster because of fewer distractions and

better quality.”

Maxwell is pleased with the results

Foglight delivers, as well as the sales

process. “With Foglight, I felt like we

were going to have a partnership,” he

says. “Our decision wasn’t just based

on product features. It felt like we were

working as partners together, and that’s

when the decision was made to go

with Foglight.”

Clearing the wayWith ecommerce sales comprising a significant portion of the company’s revenue,

Wet Seal needed an easy way to find and resolve performance problems with

its web applications, as well as alleviate end-user complaints. By using Foglight

to bring problems into view, Wet Seal was able to quickly identify the root

cause and heighten website performance while boosting IT productivity.

500Founded in 1962, the company operates more than 500 Wet Seal and Arden B. stores, as well as two online shopping sites.

2 yearsWet Seal is on track to achieve an ROI for Foglight within two years, based on prevention of costly website outages.

40 hoursThe Wet Seal IT staff has saved 40 hours each week in its programming workload, thanks to Foglight and its ability to identify and diagnose problems.

Reprinted from Dell Power Solutions, 2013 Issue 2. Copyright © 2013 Dell Inc. All rights reserved.