Case Study: Cornell University reduces complaint turnaround time and optimizes Kuali performance with AppDynamics

Cornell University Optimizes Kuali App with AppDynamics

Cornell University, a large Ivy League research and land-grant institution, deployed the Kuali Financial System to handle billing, purchasing and multi-level approvals, but complex transactions frequently caused the application to hang or crash. Existing profilers and monitoring tools (YourKit, JavaMelody) imposed too much overhead for production and didn’t provide the actionable visibility needed to correlate user complaints with root causes.

Cornell implemented AppDynamics for low‑overhead production monitoring and request snapshots, which exposed an outlier bottleneck in large payment-request transactions and enabled engineers to refactor away unnecessary work. The result was faster troubleshooting and code optimization, drastically reduced complaint turnaround times (often fixes within half a day), and improved visibility into production performance.

Cornell University

Bryan Hutchinson

Former KFS Service Manager