Case Study: Washington University in St. Louis cuts mean-time-to-resolution from days to minutes with AppDynamics

Leading Medical School Monitors Critical Applications with AppDynamics

Washington University in St. Louis School of Medicine’s Biomedical Informatics division supports researchers by providing access to millions of sensitive patient records, including a 5.5 million–record clinical data repository used for NIH- and NCI-funded studies. Because developers cannot access production data for privacy reasons, QA couldn’t reproduce real-world load, leading to intermittent performance problems—pages that suddenly took over a minute to load—and investigations that previously required days or weeks.

After deploying AppDynamics, the team quickly pinpointed a slow database call using transaction tracing and code-level diagnostics, and set up exception-based alerting to catch issues early. Mean time to resolution fell from days to minutes, problematic pages now load in seconds, and proactive monitoring prevents cascading failures—ensuring researchers and clinicians fast, reliable access to critical data.

Washington University in St. Louis

Bijoy George

Biomedical Informatics Program Manager