Case Study: The Motley Fool achieves real-time root-cause visibility and faster fixes with AppDynamics

The Motley Fool Invests in Performance with AppDynamics

The Motley Fool, a financial media company running a mix of .NET and Python/Django services, faced slow SQL, frequent production errors, and long, resource-heavy troubleshooting that relied on logs and profilers. Without a single source of truth, development and operations teams often debated root causes and could take nearly a week to resolve even minor performance issues.

By deploying AppDynamics across their .NET and Python applications (and extending it to pre-production), the team gained deep code-level instrumentation, real-time snapshots that surface problematic SQL, and a single UI for instant root-cause analysis. This replaced profilers and logs, sped up diagnosis and fixes, improved cross-team productivity and visibility, and provided ongoing production monitoring backed by responsive support.

The Motley Fool

Anne Baynes

Systems Engineer