Northwestern Mutual is an American financial services organization based out of Milwaukee, Wisconsin. As a financial security company, they provide consultation on wealth and asset income protection, education planning, retirement planning, investment advisory services, trust and private client services, estate planning and business planning. Northwestern Mutual’s products include life insurance, disability income, long-term care insurance, annuities, investments, and investment advisory products and services. Northwestern Mutual ranked 104 in the 2018 Fortune 500 list of the largest U.S. corporations by revenue and ranked 367 among America’s Best Employers by Forbes in 2019.

Northwestern Mutual’s sales team use Microsoft Dynamics 365, an application used to store client data and tools for the job. Dan Meyer, Test Engineer for Northwestern Mutual, deployed InfluxDB alongside Grafana in mandatory performance tests on Microsoft Dynamics 365 for real-time monitoring of the performance tests. Dan had originally used a load testing tool called Gatling that didn’t offer any real-time monitoring or results - this is where InfluxDB came in. Dan found that by using InfluxDB in conjunction with Grafana as a solution for monitoring performance tests in real time, he can write the results to an InfluxDB server and then use that as a data source for graphs in Grafana. Because InfluxDB is a preferred data store for Grafana, it provides for easy setup and configuration.