Case Study: Dealerware achieves deep visibility into Amazon EKS and reduces latency with IBM Instana

Dealerware brings observability to a containerized environment

Dealerware, a connected-car fleet management platform used by hundreds of dealerships and dozens of OEM brands, faced a critical challenge as it moved from a monolithic stack to a container-based architecture on AWS (ECS/EKS) while planning 500% growth in vehicles under management. To avoid service bottlenecks, latency spikes and degraded customer experience—especially after the shift to contactless workflows—Dealerware needed deep visibility into containers, API calls and database queries. They engaged IBM Instana’s Enterprise Observability Platform (the Instana agent for Amazon EKS) to monitor and map their new cloud-native environment.

IBM Instana deployed a single, auto-discovering agent that captured full traces (no sampling), mapped dependencies, provided customizable dashboards and intelligent alerts, and integrated with AWS CloudWatch. Using Instana’s real-time insights Dealerware identified and separated queued SMS jobs, cutting delivery latency from as much as 10 minutes to 10–12 seconds, rapidly diagnosed microservice latency, and closed performance gaps. With IBM Instana, Dealerware now monitors end-to-end performance, works toward sub-250 ms service-call goals, and has freed engineering capacity to accelerate features and CI/CD.

Dealerware

Kenneth Skertchly

Sr. DevOps Engineer