Benefits
Overview
CCC Intelligent Solutions (CCC) is a leading provider of software-as-a-service solutions to the auto claims and collision repair industry, powering the complex workflows behind getting vehicles back on the road following an accident. To boost visibility into application performance, CCC migrated to Amazon Web Services (AWS) and implemented AWS managed services so that teams could focus on innovation, not managing infrastructure.
The company’s site reliability engineers (SREs) had been using several third-party tools for visibility into operations. As CCC migrated its workloads on AWS, it wanted to streamline its observability to support all its core systems in the cloud. It implemented Amazon CloudWatch, a service that monitors applications, responds to performance changes, optimizes resource use, and provides insights into operational health. Using CloudWatch, CCC cut its mean time to resolution by 20–30 percent depending on the issue severity and complexity, reduced monitoring costs by 25 percent, and substantially increased productivity for its teams.
About CCC Intelligent Solutions
CCC Intelligent Solutions is a leader in the auto claims and collision repair industry, helping insurers, body shops, parts suppliers, and others automate and streamline the auto claims and repair process through advanced tools and technology.
Opportunity | Using AWS to streamline observability into operations
Founded in 1980, CCC processes an estimated 17 million auto claims annually. It helps more than 35,000 companies—including insurers, auto body shops, medical professionals, and auto manufacturers—make decisions that help people get back on the road following an accident.
Over the years, CCC onboarded multiple technology stacks, running its workloads on premises. Recognizing the need to migrate and modernize operations in the cloud, CCC evaluated its options and chose AWS, with VP and chief architect Guy Rapaport leading the initiative. “Being cloud native means that we can focus all our efforts on building product and creating added value for our customers instead of managing lower-level infrastructure,” says Rapaport. “Together with that idea, observability should be native as well.”
CCC completed its migration by the end of 2024. The company adopted a suite of AWS services, orchestrating and managing compute resources automatically through Amazon Elastic Kubernetes Service (Amazon EKS), which lets organizations start, run, and scale Kubernetes without thinking about cluster management. The company implemented AWS Lambda to run code without provisioning or managing servers, and it adopted Amazon Managed Streaming for Apache Kafka (Amazon MSK), a streaming data service that manages Apache Kafka infrastructure. CCC also added a new automated landing zone to help increase efficiency.
CCC sought to improve visibility into more than 500 services in production, preproduction, and development, with SRE director Muthukumaran Ardhanary leading the initiative. “We wanted to use as many AWS-native tools as possible, so that we have all the visibility, monitoring, and observability,” says Subrat Mishra, VP of SRE and database technology at CCC. “That’s why we started using Amazon CloudWatch at the core of our application and all our systems.”
Solution | Monitoring 5 billion daily transactions using AWS
In collaboration with AWS Enterprise Support, CCC’s SRE automation manager, John Seifert, oversaw the proof of concept, integrating automation into monitoring processes. The company became one of the early users of CloudWatch Application Signals, which provides organizations with a unified, application-centric view of their applications, services, and dependencies. During the proof of concept, Ardhanary and Seifert met weekly with AWS teams to provide feedback, suggesting features such as cross-account observability to monitor and troubleshoot applications that span multiple AWS accounts and AWS Regions.
Using Application Signals, CCC monitors service-level objectives like latency and availability, measuring performance against its business goals. Breaches of predetermined thresholds set off CloudWatch alarms, which send notifications or automatically make changes to resources in response.
CCC consolidated the functions of its third-party tools as it implemented CloudWatch, gaining greater observability into the 5 billion daily transactions that it facilitates for customers daily. In addition to Application Signals, CCC uses other interactive analytics features of CloudWatch Transaction Search for heightened visibility of its application transaction spans—the steps involved as an action travels through the system. CCC sends spans to CloudWatch Application Observability (APM) (previously AWS X-Ray), which helps CCC spot and fix application issues. CloudWatch APM collects trace data that helps CCC identify issues or opportunities for optimization. “We have a huge number of complex transactions,” says Rapaport. “That’s why we are using Application Signals and almost every feature of CloudWatch. The ability to drill down, follow the transaction, see where it slows down, and find the impact of issues is critical.” In one recent modernization project, CCC used CloudWatch and Application Signals for visibility into application performance behavior, making it possible for CCC to adjust the application accordingly.
Instead of waiting for an SRE to troubleshoot, CCC is adopting a self-service approach for internal stakeholders. Developers, for example, can customize CloudWatch dashboards to track metrics relevant to their performance testing or development environments, improving testing and monitoring before deploying to production. “We’re using our dashboards and self-service portals to stay apprised on all activity in the environment,” says Rapaport. “That’s how we gain productivity.”
Outcome | Achieving operational excellence using proactive monitoring
CCC has gained a comprehensive view of its Amazon EKS usage through CloudWatch Container Insights, which collects, aggregates, and summarizes metrics and logs from containerized applications and microservices. Container Insights also provides diagnostic information, such as container restart failures, to help CCC isolate and resolve issues quickly.
By using CloudWatch, CCC can ability control its use and sampling; this means that CCC can further optimize usage and cost. It collects a sample of telemetry data and ramps up only if there’s an issue. This helps CCC expand its coverage to additional environments—mainly, its load testing environments. “CloudWatch is a unified tool that helps us understand potential issues much faster,” said Rappaport. In fact, CCC has reduced time to resolution by up to 30 percent while reducing its monitoring cost by 25 percent.
Going forward, CCC will implement more AWS services to support operational efficiency. “As our cloud provider, AWS provides ease of use, operational excellence, deployment, and consolidation of our monitoring,” says Rapaport.
AWS services used
Did you find what you were looking for today?
Let us know so we can improve the quality of the content on our pages