"The first two years we did our Super Bowl campaign were very, very manual," Grau says. "This year, I felt confident going into the Super Bowl. We had the right tools."

Houska adds, "It's essentially like flying blind and then suddenly having eagle-eye vision. It's very exciting to have that kind of visibility that you never had before."

The difference was that two weeks before Super Bowl XLVI, Cars.com deployed Compuware dynaTrace for its continuous, real-time APM. Grau's team had been testing it for six weeks prior to deployment.

"For the most part, from the time we chose the product to the time we were running it in production was about a month," Houska says. "We were getting value out of the product before we even purchased it just in the visibility we gained through the POC [proof of concept]."

Grau adds, "The stuff we were seeing in the trial and the POC, we saw the immediate business benefit. We knew the gaps the tool was exposing in our applications were huge."