How Nordstrom Ensures its Website Will Perform at 100% This Holiday Season

It's a scenario that's unfortunately all-too-common for retailers: You create an exciting sale or product event during the busy holiday season, and a flood of shoppers come online to scoop up the deals. But soon after the merchandise is posted, your site begins to waver and then crash due to the weight of the increased traffic.

How can you ensure consumers enjoy a secure, fast and engaging shopping experience — and one that doesn't crash — on your website this holiday season?

To find out, I spoke with Gopal Brugalette, the applied architect for Nordstrom's performance engineering team, who works closely with the retailer's technology and business partners in an effort to deliver high-performance applications and systems for the enterprise. Brugalette is also responsible for making sure Nordstrom's website functions at 100 percent even with the influx of traffic during the holiday season.

"At Nordstrom, we're always preparing for two big events: our anniversary sale in July and then the holidays," Brugalette said. "We have to be ready for very high volumes as early as July. So from January to July, we're prepping for high volumes, and then from July to November, we're prepping for the holiday rush. It's always on our minds."

To prepare for these events, Brugalette and his team test Nordstrom.com multiple times to ensure it works as engineered. The company relies on Dynatrace's application performance management (APM) tools. In short, APM tools monitor and manage the performance and availability of software applications and websites. They detect and diagnose application performance problems before they start in an effort to maintain an expected level of service. And in the event of any issues, the tools help to identify the causes.

With Dynatrace's APM solutions, "we can pinpoint where a problem may arise before it actually does," said Brugalette.

APM tools enable more than simple load testing, which involves putting simulated demand on a system or device prior to a busy event and measuring its response. "We're not just simulating thousands of users coming to our site," Brugalette said. "We're diving deep into the infrastructure to see what's happening and checking to see if there are any problems or pieces of code that we have to correct."

Sometimes the testing reveals chinks in Nordstrom's armor. In one instance, "we found that our system was duplicating our inventory checks, which was adding time to our customers’ checkout experiences," Brugalette said. "We removed those extra checks, and immediately our customers’ checkout experiences were much improved and took place much more quickly."

Nordstrom is also using Dynatrace's APM tools to support its omnichannel efforts, which include mobile point-of-sales systems and mobile fulfillment applications. Dynatrace's APM tools anchor Nordstrom's omnichannel pre-production environment so that the company can learn "exactly where the issues are and where the issues aren't," Brugalette said. "And when we fix it, we know it's fixed."

Brugalette offered the following best practices around monitoring site performance for retailers to implement before the holiday rush:

1. Test early, test often. "And be prepared for huge spikes in traffic when you're testing," Brugalette said.

2. Focus on planning. Even this close to the holidays, "plan it out so that you test the right things," Brugalette said. "And if your testing cycles are short or not as extensive as you hoped, test what's most important."

3. Get the whole team on board. This means more than just all of the performance engineering team, Brugalette said. "I mean everyone with a stake in the website — representatives from marketing, IT, operations, development, possibly a business manager or PR person, and, of course, the performance engineering team."

4. Establish goals. And make sure both business and IT provide input into those goals, success criteria, and test plan and methodology. Additionally, Brugalette said, "you have to think about your customer’s goals. You need to test from the customer’s perspective, and test what they want to do."