About Vodafone:
● Serving 19 million subscribers in Ukraine as of the end of 2021

Industry:
Telecommunications

Vodafone needs no introduction. By the end of 2021, its network served 19 million subscribers in Ukraine, making it one of the largest telecom operators in the country. With a robust IT infrastructure and a diverse range of software systems, Vodafone supports both its customer-facing services and internal operations through digital efficiency.

At Vodafone, IT is the backbone of the business — ensuring the quality and reliability of IT services is a top priority.

We spoke with Andrii Penkovskyi, Head of the Application Systems Operation Unit, and Andrii Mykytenko, Senior System Administrator, to learn how Vodafone chose and implemented an advanced application monitoring solution.

Why did Vodafone require an application monitoring platform?
To fully and effectively support any complex software environment, a comprehensive monitoring system is essential.
And in the case of highly sophisticated systems — especially those involving complex architectures and diverse functionalities — you need deep visibility into operational metrics: interactions with external systems, load behavior, and low-level errors. For us, this includes our operational CRM platform and the self-service mobile app for subscribers.
Given how critical these systems are to our business, we needed an advanced monitoring solution that could both assess and optimize performance. That’s where Dynatrace came in.

Monitoring during development: What’s unique at Vodafone?
At Vodafone, software development is handled by a dedicated in-house subsidiary, with additional products coming from external vendors. We collaborate with them under formal agreements, using a shared task tracking and control system.

In such a setup, it's crucial to provide vendors with accurate, comprehensive diagnostics. Monitoring data is a critical part of that feedback loop, helping us clearly define issues and accelerate resolution.

Who uses Dynatrace beyond your team?
Dynatrace isn’t just used internally. We regularly share diagnostic insights with our development team. The concept of a single pane of glass — what Dynatrace calls the “single source of truth” — has greatly improved collaboration and communication. This transparency helps vendors work more efficiently and meet their SLAs. So, Dynatrace not only eases our burden, but also strengthens our contractual relationships.

In which daily tasks do you use Dynatrace?
Dynatrace runs 24/7, automatically detecting anomalies in our application stack.

While Vodafone has a dedicated monitoring department, Dynatrace plays a complementary role — and often identifies issues before our main monitoring team does. Some team members also use the vendor’s mobile app to receive instant alerts, which has proven incredibly convenient.

For us, the core purpose of Dynatrace is diagnostics. Once an issue is flagged, we pass the findings to the relevant development team for resolution.

How many internal resources do you spend on supporting the solution?
Thanks to close cooperation with the integrator and vendor, we spend minimal effort maintaining and configuring Dynatrace. Pre-built dashboards and an intuitive interface meet nearly all of our needs, keeping our resource use low.

How does Davis AI (artificial intelligence) help you solve routine tasks?
One of the biggest benefits is that we no longer have to manually define metric thresholds. Built-in problem types and reporting capabilities make life easier. Instead of a flood of alerts during an incident, we now receive a single, detailed notification that explains what went wrong and why.

Could you describe one of the latest cases of using the Dynatrace platform and how it helped?
One of our recent cases involved a performance bottleneck in the architecture of our mobile app. There were capacity issues between specific components. Dynatrace helped us quickly identify the problem and adjust load balancing and capacity at the node level — something we hadn’t been able to do with other tools.

Looking ahead: Monitoring in a microservices world
We’re actively transitioning toward microservices and containerization as a future-proof architecture for our products. Dynatrace is already being rolled out across this new environment.

As for corporate monitoring: if you're still thinking about it — don’t. Just implement and start using it. While we’re strong supporters of open-source tools, combining them with Dynatrace has allowed us to see more, act faster, and improve not only the performance of our services but also the quality of collaboration between our teams.