Down for Everybody? Wednesday's Fantasy Football Draft

by Team AppNeta on August 29, 2014

Here at AppNeta we have a tradition of creating a Fantasy Football league every year.  Each year we decide who the commissioner is and then we start the grueling process of selecting draft order, league rules, team names, date of draft and most importantly selecting the platform to draft on.  Our league consists of members of the management, engineering, customer success and business development organizations.  It is truly a team-building fun exercise.

Typically the Fantasy Football draft takes our mind off of the typical discussion points of SaaS, Big Data, Yet Bigger Data, and Full-Stack Monitoring.  However, this year we had an unexpected change in events.

Our draft was scheduled for 7:00PM EST on Wednesday night, which was agreed upon by the members of the league.  During this time AppNeta Fantasy Football players were logging into the platform, and preparing their draft picks.  Our league had members from the entire globe accessing the platform.  This year we experienced something new.  The web platform we were using to draft was having performance issues.  We then quickly checked the website from AppView, which leverages data from locations all around the globe.  We saw performance availability issues from the outside in.

During the draft we had setup a conference bridge to discuss the events of the draft, and it quickly turned into a discussion around Application Performance Management.  There was evidence of unexpected slow transactions, database calls that weren’t being properly handled, and other issues that might have been created from a recent release or deploy into production of their web application.

I then quickly checked Twitter, Sitedown, and some other user-driven feedback sites.  I noticed other users were experiencing some of the same intermittent issues.  Just because the website was accessible and content was on the page for a couple of us, that didn’t mean the platform was working properly.  We quickly saw how application performance can affect customer satisfaction, brand, and marketing efforts of a company’s core products.  I was happy that this was only an issue with a fantasy football platform and not an electronic health record platform.

It’s always exciting to see the new features of the different fantasy football platforms.  Since there are a few different platforms for Fantasy Football, we had actually picked this one because of their recent improvements to analytics and rankings.  In the fast world of agile software development, continuous deployments of releases the monitoring of end-user performance becomes paramount to the success of a company’s product.

Unfortunately, I wasn’t able to get into the draft until my second-round pick but I am excited for the season to begin and look forward to another successful fantasy football season.