Expanding Your Company’s Cloud Capabilities with Garmisch

At Guidewire, we’re committed to enhancing the developer experience on Guidewire Cloud Platform (GWCP) so that our customers can stay agile and speed development. The cloud gives insurers a system of record that is simpler to manage, easier to upgrade, and powers innovation!

Today I’m excited to share several of the newest advancements with Garmisch, on two fronts:

1. Observability and monitoring; and

2. Expanded developer capabilities on Guidewire Cloud Platform

Customize Observability and Monitoring for GWCP Applications

If I had to summarize the new features around observability and monitoring in Garmisch with one phrase, it would be ‘self-service.’ Leading up to Garmisch, Datadog was generally available for Guidewire Cloud customers to access logs and view predefined out-of-the box dashboards for core InsuranceSuite functions that Guidewire regularly monitors. We’re now letting customers create their own metrics that they can monitor themselves to gain greater business insights. Let’s look at a few of the latest features:

1. Monitor business functionality - Customers can create metrics based on business functionality like the lifecycle of a claim, policy renewal timelines, and invoice processing times, and connect them to the Guidewire provided template dashboards to view the performance of these metrics. Monitors can then be created to trigger alerts when critical thresholds are reached.

2. Create dashboards for your key metrics - We’ve introduced self-service monitoring, which is an opportunity to design and customize dashboards, metrics, and alerts that meet the unique needs of your company. This is additive to the offerings Guidewire has already built and provided.

3. Enable rich data analysis - Apply tags and attributes such as success, failure, and authentication to indexed logs to enable data analysis that feeds richer and more informative dashboards.

Monitoring and observability is a crucial area of development focus, and I expect us to continue to invest here to deliver additional capabilities and expand the value to our customers. Next, let’s dive into additional developer tools for Guidewire Cloud Console.

Enhance Developer Experience in Guidewire Cloud Console

Guidewire Cloud Console is the self-service interface to develop, deploy, and manage any Guidewire application in the cloud. With each release, we focus on empowering our customers’ developers with expanded capabilities. Garmisch is no different, and there are important features to highlight:

1. Accelerate dry-run deployments - Using the database backup and restore feature, which supports large databases and enables users to quickly copy production data into pre-production, the feature leverages AWS Snapshot to allow developers to move production data into a pre-production star system. For InsuranceSuite production deployments, Guidewire provides a pre-production 'dry run' planet with a dedicated AWS Aurora Postgres Cluster.

2. Deploy with more flexibility - Developers can now roll back application builds and database states to revert to the last successful state.

3. Notifications of GWCP maintenance windows - Developers will receive a notification if they attempt to deploy during a GWCP maintenance window to flag that the system will block that deployment in that timeframe. Additionally, they will receive a second confirmation when they are about to deploy to production.

4. Drive greater control over the build pipeline - Schedule builds in TeamCity from Guidewire Cloud Console. We’re making it easier for customers who want to automate running builds at times that don't affect normal day-to-day processes, especially when working with large test suites. Developers can now schedule builds for InsuranceSuite, the Guidewire Testing Framework, and EnterpriseEngage in TeamCity from within the Guidewire Cloud Console.

Developing and deploying applications is a complex process and we’re always striving to make it easier for customers on Guidewire Cloud Platform. With these new capabilities, teams can be confident in delivering value more efficiently while retaining more control over their development process. To learn more about this current release of GWCP, check out the Release Highlights, visit the landing page, or read the press release today!