Oregon Health Authority cuts payment application detection time by 50% with IBM Instana Observability

Oregon Health Authority's Office of Information Services (OIS) cut mean time to detect on the eXPRS electronic payment application by 50% and mean time to resolve by 30% after deploying IBM Instana Observability alongside IBM Customer Success on top of its existing Java EE stack. eXPRS — the Electronic Xpress Processing and Reporting System — manages payments and services for more than 30,000 individuals with disabilities across Oregon. Before the rollout, the application experienced performance issues and outages; without visibility into eXPRS internals, the OIS team could not pinpoint root cause, prolonging resolution times and risking delivery of critical services to a vulnerable population. "Instana has given us the visibility we need to ensure that eXPRS is consistently available and performing optimally. This is critical for the individuals who depend on these services," said Dan Major, Sr. Enterprise Systems Analyst at OIS. The deployment plugged Instana into eXPRS's existing Java EE platform on IBM Power servers running WebSphere Liberty application runtime with IBM DB2 databases, exposing every layer from application logic down to underlying hardware parameters. Automated discovery and topology mapping meant new components and updates registered themselves without manual wiring, giving OIS a continuously refreshed dependency view. Real-time analysis with 100% data capture, immediate notification mechanisms, and adaptive algorithmic models that continually fine-tune threshold settings drove the MTTD and MTTR reductions. Collaboration features also broke down silos between IT teams by sharing the same performance and dependency data. With the rollout, OIS achieved its stated goal of delivering more reliable services to the populations depending on eXPRS, while improving IT productivity across teams.