Customer Scenario

Evaluating and purchasing a platform is one challenge. Gaining organizational adoption is another. Achieving increased adoption of a software platform requires a combination of champions for the tools and proof of value.

This is especially true within government agencies, where the competition between vendor solutions can be fierce, and various agencies in the organization have been using a particular technology for a long time. A clear understanding of the usage and value proposition of a platform can be essential to the longevity of a solution and its expanded adoption.

After a recent acquisition of the MuleSoft solution, we recommended that our government client leverage MuleSoft’s Metrics Accelerator tool to track data on the value of the investment, its usage and collect data to support increased adoption.

Government entities face many challenges when implementing tools, from complex network setups to security requirements. The client needed to stand the platform up quickly and provide an easy way for business stakeholders to access and visualize the data while adhering to the agency’s security requirements and governance.

Solution

To meet the multitude of requirements our client had, we designed a hybrid solution that combined the power of the MuleSoft Metrics Accelerator with the flexibility of AWS. Big Compass started by customizing the Metrics Accelerator and then deploying it to the client’s MuleSoft GovCloud environment. This allows the application to gather metrics from various MuleSoft business groups across environments.

Typically, the MuleSoft Metrics Accelerator would push data to an application like Splunk or ELK. However, because of the complex networking and security requirements for the client, the solution performs the opposite approach. Using the Metrics Accelerator API, the data is pulled out of the MuleSoft GovCloud solution using the ELK stack.

Streamlined implementation meant using out-of-the-box solutions where available. However, an AWS Lambda was developed to make the request to the MuleSoft Metrics Accelerator API and persist the data in AWS to be visualized. When it came to persisting the data, our solution used Amazon Elasticsearch, which alleviated the need to manage a server to store the metrics.

Finally, to ensure that business stakeholders would have access to the data and be able to parse the information easily, Big Compass helped configure a Kibana dashboard. This creates beautiful, straightforward, and easy to understand dashboards for those who need them.

Results

With the Metrics Accelerator and AWS tools in place, a solution to meet the client’s needs was developed quickly and securely. They now have easy and clear visibility into the MuleSoft platform’s usage against each agency’s key performance indicators (KPIs) using Amazon ElasticSearch for visualization.

In total, the KPI dashboard built on Amazon ElasticSearch contains 6 dashboards, separated by category, and nearly 70 MuleSoft GovCloud metrics for users across the government entity to view.

This solution will give the client the ability to determine resource needs in the future based on how the MuleSoft platform is being used. With a clear understanding of usage data and API reuse KPIs, the client can efficiently leverage their MuleSoft licenses across the agency.