Case Study: Apartments.com achieves 20x faster SQL performance and enterprise-level visibility with AppDynamics

Apartments.com Helps Customers Feel at Home with AppDynamics

Apartments.com, a national online marketplace for rental listings powered by custom .NET applications and a large apartment database, was redeveloping its entire website and preparing for up to eight times more traffic. The team needed enterprise-grade application performance monitoring for a new, asynchronous architecture—capabilities their existing APM (New Relic) could not provide—creating a critical visibility and troubleshooting gap during a high-stakes rewrite.

They implemented AppDynamics, which was quick to deploy across servers and easy for junior staff to use, and immediately provided end-to-end visibility across tiers. AppDynamics pinpointed compute, network, cache and SQL issues, enabling fixes that cut a key SQL call from 500 ms to 80 ms (≈20x), resolved incidents in minutes rather than days, averted outages, and supported the platform rewrite to scale the application eightfold.

Apartments.com

Jonathan Sieja

Technical Operations Manager