Porsche Informatik boosts performance and security for customer-facing applications with Elastic on Microsoft Azure

Headquartered in Salzburg, Austria, Porsche Holding Salzburg, the industry leader in automotive sales, has expanded its reach throughout Europe while establishing a significant presence in Colombia, Chile, China, Malaysia, Singapore, and Japan. With a rich heritage of excellence, Porsche Holding Salzburg has cemented its reputation as the largest and most successful car dealer in Europe.

Data-driven support by Porsche Informatik

As a subsidiary of Porsche Holding, Porsche Informatik is the IT division and is active in 34 countries on four continents, with more than 900 employees. It services millions of users across 180 IT solutions every day, combining decades of expertise in IT and the automotive industry with a holistic vision of how to navigate the digital transformation the industry is undergoing. 

Porsche Informatik is responsible for the development and smooth operation of internal IT applications—from service acceptance in the car workshop to the car configurator on the website to the logistics of tomorrow's spare parts supply. Porsche Informatik has developed hundreds of applications, including a digital vehicle configurator that helps customers design their perfect Porsche and back-office systems that keep the business running efficiently.

The goal of Porsche Informatik is to proactively identify restrictions without having to rely on users to report them. The use of Elastic Log Management thus contributes to improving the performance of the online applications for sales, financing, and service. This team of specialists is also responsible for Porsche Informatik’s dealer management system, CROSS, which supports more than 55,500 users for sales and service in 21 countries. For dealers, this essential tool can make the difference between a sale and a lost customer, so it needs to be as responsive and reliable as the vehicles in the showroom. 

Any slowdown or interruption results in a call to Janine Hoffinger, Head of CROSS Service Delivery at Porsche Informatik.

"Merchants used to call us when the system was running slowly, but we rarely knew if it was a local network issue or something more serious. We were only expected to fix it," Hoffinger said.

Hoffinger reached out to her colleague Daniel Ivanovski, a system engineer at Porsche Informatik. He immediately saw the potential of Elastic Observability to solve Hoffinger's challenge.

Fine-tuning the technology engine

Elastic Observability unifies logs, universal profiling, user experience data, synthetics, application traces, and infrastructure metrics in a single stack.

"We use Elastic Observability to monitor most of our system architecture, including our Connected Retail Platform and Enterprise Resource Planning platforms. The data is collected and organized in the Elasticsearch database, and we use Kibana to visualize trends and intervene when they reach a critical threshold," Ivanovski said.

Today, Porsche Informatik operates Elastic on both on-premises servers and the Elastic Cloud hosted on Microsoft Azure.

"We chose Azure because we run a lot of Microsoft services in-house. We use Azure Private Link to minimize the exposure of data on the public internet and increase our overall security," Ivanovski said.