For Insight Global, a company dedicated to connecting qualified professionals with companies in the U.S., UK, and Canada, connection sits at the core of their mission. Though essential to their daily business operations, ensuring a cohesive, efficient network for thousands of clients is no effortless feat.
Fortunately, Insight Global has been able to navigate a diverse landscape of workplaces better than most and thus secure its objective of empowering those they serve using ThousandEyes. Insight Global has gained broad visibility into its networks, reduced troubleshooting time, and is now monitoring its employee's digital experience more efficiently.
An Unprecedented Challenge: Stabilizing Hybrid Networks
Insight Global was founded in 2001 as an entrepreneurial start-up. And while the company focuses primarily on IT staffing, its recruiters also work with businesses to find top-tier talent across a diverse range of industries, including finance, healthcare, government, and more—ultimately pairing job seekers with work that will enable them to thrive.
To achieve this goal, Insight Global relies on technology to power its workforce of over 3,000 recruiters and account managers. Collaboration applications are critical in allowing recruiters to communicate with candidates and ultimately pair them with suitable positions.
"We're a staffing company," said Michael Kutka, Network Architect at Insight Global. "We are meeting with hiring managers at different companies, and we need to make sure that no matter what conferencing solution our teams are using in this hybrid world, they have the best video and audio experience."
Yet, despite Insight Global's advantageous position at the nexus of technology and talent, the company faced a significant challenge in managing its large-scale transition to hybrid work. Namely, limited visibility into network connectivity and application performance for their distributed workforce made it difficult to pinpoint and troubleshoot issues, including several uptime issues with their internal applications. And while teams were excited to regain a common physical space to work together, some employees experienced connectivity issues with the shared network in their office. In this tech-driven industry, ensuring a reliable network is vital, so Insight Global turned to ThousandEyes.
Implementing WAN Insights To Drive Progress
Today, Insight Global uses ThousandEyes WAN Insights and Enterprise Agents to streamline operations, improve overall efficiency, and ultimately look ahead to future company-wide IT improvements.
Fewer Tickets, Greater Innovation
At Insight Global, Kutka oversees new technology solutions. First introduced to the idea of WAN Insights at Cisco Live, he found ThousandEyes' use of statistical models to forecast network conditions on Cisco SD-WAN promising. "Upon seeing it, I immediately thought, 'Wow, this is a game changer,'" he said.
Before implementing WAN Insights, Kutka routinely saw brownout issues and degradation in some of the company's circuits. Eventually, he realized that his team needed to move beyond the basic path monitoring and transition to a more robust way to monitor the path quality of Internet circuits.
WAN Insights provided Kutka and his team with powerful new insight into the quality of experience across its enterprise network and remote offices. After implementing WAN Insights, Kutka quickly determined that some offices had below 80 percent path quality, which his team could address by making targeted changes that would boost their quality to 99 percent. Kutka and his team can also consistently keep their path quality at 94 percent; anytime they see a drop-off from this benchmark, Insight Global's network operations team is alerted and immediately starts to remedy the issue.
By using WAN Insights, the IT team could focus on routing traffic rather than load balancing, allowing them to spend more time on strategic efforts that the company sought to accomplish with the energy they diverted away from troubleshooting. Kutka and his team almost immediately experienced a steep drop in service desk tickets from the field and end users. "By leveraging WAN Insights to route around issues that we're seeing in our network and making smarter and more informed decisions," Kutka explained, "we're able to make sure that we're running the most efficient and successful network."
Fueling Customer-Focused Solutions
After migrating to Cisco's SD-WAN solution from an MPLS solution, Insight Global deployed a fleet of ThousandEyes Enterprise Agents—embedded on Cisco Catalyst 9000 switches—to monitor the performance of critical business applications. With this mix of solutions, Kutka can now pinpoint the exact issues his team faces, reducing the number of times the network is blamed unfairly for disruptions. "We're able to make sure that from the core router and network at the remote locations, we're always getting statistics and experience with the application," he said.
Kutka acknowledged that, to his surprise, he discovered misconfigurations on some internal Insight Global interfaces, an issue that would've otherwise gone unnoticed without ThousandEyes. Moreover, Kutka can now conduct test runs—like checking DNS status or authentication success rates—against their internal applications. "Enterprise Agents allow us to get that visibility," Kutka says. Gaining this clarity allowed his team to strengthen their applications and deliver higher network bandwidth to clients.
Staying Ahead of the Curve
For the first time, Kutka and his team can be proactive rather than reactive. This newfound awareness provided by ThousandEyes has also spread to other teams within Insight Global. Many now intend on using ThousandEyes to monitor their applications, too.
Kutka also notes that he continues to see an increase in productivity from end users, himself, and his team. With the help of WAN Insights, users have been able to meet and work with clients rather than focus on connectivity issues that may or may not be related to their network.
Looking forward, Kutka hopes to leverage ThousandEyes to further assist Insight Global's digital user experience by defining more custom applications that will increase the scope of his team's network monitoring. By deploying Endpoint Agents on end-user devices and garnering meaningful statistical data about their experience with Enterprise Agents, Kutka hopes to gain deeply contextual insight into the applications end users rely on.
"Whether they're at a remote office or they're home working or at Starbucks, we're able to get better insight into the applications that they're using and the experience with that application."