Dynatrace Case Studies WGU Enhances E-Learning Experience with Dynatrace
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WGU Enhances E-Learning Experience with Dynatrace

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Western Governors University (WGU), a U.S.-based online university, is dedicated to making higher education as accessible as possible for a diverse range of students. These students require a seamless experience every time they log in to a WGU system, whether it's to study, access a course, or take an assessment. Any disruption can impact their studies, motivation, and grades. The performance and availability of WGU’s e-learning platforms, especially during peak times ahead of an assessment, are therefore crucial. These platforms are built on a dynamic cloud-based architecture, to enable greater agility and rapid innovation. However, with a constantly changing technology stack, the WGU team found it challenging to get a 360-degree view of all its applications or understand the critical dependencies across its heterogenous environment. They needed end-to-end observability across its applications and infrastructure to identify and resolve issues as quickly as possible, to maintain seamless student experiences.
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Western Governors University (WGU) is a non-profit, online-only college for adults who want to get their degree at their own pace. The university offers a self-guided study to accommodate flexible schedules. With over 140,000 students enrolled, WGU is dedicated to making higher education as accessible as possible for as many people as possible. Students come from all U.S. states and backgrounds and need a flexible learning style to fit around their busy work and home lives. WGU's e-learning platforms are built on a dynamic cloud-based architecture, to enable greater agility and rapid innovation that keeps WGU ahead of the curve.
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After evaluating the market, WGU selected Dynatrace for its highly automated, intelligent system approach. Dynatrace provides a unified view of e-learning journeys, helping WGU to quickly understand the student experience across its end-to-end technology stack and identify potential breaking points before they impact learning journeys. This enables WGU’s engineering team to maintain performance and availability across its platforms, ensuring students can access their learning resources whenever and wherever they need to, with minimal or no disruptions. With Dynatrace’s Smartscape technology, WGU has a continuously updated topology map that enables its teams to see upstream and downstream systems and understand all dependencies across the stack. This insight into the cause and wider impact of specific issues allows them to optimize student experiences more effectively. When problems do occur, Dynatrace’s automatic and intelligent observability capabilities instantly alert the engineering team to the issue, enabling proactive resolution.
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The implementation of Dynatrace has significantly improved the responsiveness of WGU's system. When problems occur, Dynatrace’s automatic and intelligent observability capabilities instantly alert the engineering team to the issue. Previously, many faults remained undetected until students reported issues they had when accessing a particular system, but now engineers can proactively resolve issues as soon as they emerge. Dynatrace has also significantly reduced the time it takes WGU to resolve issues in its students’ learning journeys, by offering precise answers that reveal the root-cause in real time. This means that WGU’s engineering teams no longer need to spend time trying to understand what caused an issue, and can get straight onto resolving them, which minimizes disruption for students.
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