U-Haul shifts faster with Dynatrace

U-Haul rents moving and storage equipment to more customers in the U.S. and Canada than anyone else. To deliver its services, hundreds of thousands of pieces of equipment are constantly transferred between millions of customers, across 22,000 locations. It would be impossible to operate at this scale manually, so the technology teams at U-Haul are continually working to improve their software and automate more processes. This software supports everything from enabling U-Haul to understand where its equipment is, where customers want to go, and what prices it should charge, to running security and verification checks on customers’ driving licenses. This ensures customers can quickly and effortlessly book equipment online and make last-minute alternative arrangements if their plans change, autonomously.

Given the stresses of moving, customers have little patience for any delays in their digital journey. It’s essential that U-Haul mobile and web applications provide a seamless user-experience to ensure a high level of customer satisfaction and to maximize revenue. However, this was becoming more challenging as U-Haul continued to scale operations, which led to an increasingly complex cloud ecosystem. U-Haul found its approach to monitoring the performance of its applications and managing user experiences could no longer keep up with this complex cloud environment.

“Whenever we had a problem with our software, our teams would find themselves being dragged into war rooms at any time of the day or night to dig through mountains of data in search of a solution,” said Brian Rutherford, Director of Software Development at U-Haul. “Not only did that result in countless hours of productivity being lost from innovation projects, but it also meant that the work/life balance of our teams was suffering. We realized that this was no longer sustainable, and our operations had scaled beyond our existing monitoring capabilities.”

Recognizing it needed a more effective approach to managing the delivery of its applications, U-Haul turned to Dynatrace. The automatic and intelligent observability from Dynatrace enabled U-Haul to quickly identify solutions that would previously have required a whole team of analysts to uncover. It has also enabled U-Haul to consolidate multiple monitoring solutions into a single platform, improving the efficiency of its teams.

“Dynatrace is one of the best solutions we’ve ever deployed, it gives us answers to absolutely everything,” said Rutherford. “Our applications are a strategic competitive advantage, as the better we can build them, the more we can expand our business. Dynatrace fundamentally changes the way we work, build our applications, and support our customers. I love that it’s so easy to use; the automation capabilities mean we don’t have to go in and instrument our code manually.”

• Accelerating innovation – Davis, Dynatrace’s AI engine, processes billions of dependencies across the U-Haul environment in real-time. Alerts contain precise solutions for any anomalies that arise, which has helped U-Haul to improve its CI/CD pipeline. As a result, its development team can see problems before they occur and proactively prevent them. This enables the team to focus on continuous innovation and creating better customer experiences.
• Creating a better work/life balance – Dynatrace has eliminated complex back-and-forth between teams, providing a single source of truth that can be used to instantly identify solutions to problems. This allows for more effective collaboration and a dramatic reduction in time spent identifying the cause of problems and anomalies. As a result, IT teams no longer find themselves called into war rooms on the weekend, so they can enjoy more time with their families.
• Unlocking unparalleled insights – U-Haul is using Dynatrace’s Session Replay capabilities to allow its teams to visually replay the complete digital experience of any customer using its software, across any device. As a result, it can gain an unparalleled insight into how customers use its applications and understand any issues they encounter. U-Haul has used this to identify where customers are rage clicking when their digital journey isn’t progressing as expected, so its development team can make proactive improvements that help to optimize revenues.
• Enabling better business outcomes – with Dynatrace’s Application and Microservices, Digital Experience, Business Analytics Modules, U-Haul now understands the impact of digital performance on critical KPIs, including conversions and revenue, in real-time. These insights help U-Haul’s teams improve user journeys, shorten development cycles, and accelerate the impact of their efforts on the business.

“Dynatrace has allowed us to move from a ‘war room-mentality’, where we were on call and meeting at any hour of the day to troubleshoot problems, to being laser-focused on how we take ourselves and our business to the next level,” added Rutherford. “The capabilities Dynatrace brings to our team ensure our developers aren’t woken up at 4am or missing time with their families on the weekend. It’s like having a focus group with all our customers, across 22,000 locations, which is tremendously helpful, not just for IT and development, but for our executive management as well.”