Case Study: Liberty University achieves rapid performance problem‑solving and end-to-end application visibility with AppDynamics

Liberty University Offers a Lesson in Performance Problem-Solving

Liberty University, the nation’s largest private nonprofit university serving some 110,000 students, runs a complex learning environment centered on a heavily customized Blackboard LMS. Major software upgrades and an environment migration caused intermittent but severe performance problems—crashing app servers and widespread slowness—while noisy logs and lack of end‑to‑end visibility left DBAs chasing likely but incorrect causes for weeks.

After trying AppDynamics, the team gained real‑time transaction tracing and a single pane for deep drill‑down. That visibility quickly revealed a Java 1.7 JDK bug (leading to a vendor patch) and, during a later incident, isolated extremely slow NFS storage as the bottleneck. The result: far faster root‑cause discovery, reduced time spent poring through logs, and ongoing application intelligence and trending that make troubleshooting and stakeholder communication much more efficient.

Liberty University

Scott Howe

System Administrator