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Experience Is Everything
Sixty-thousand customer accounts rely on this company’s customer service platform to foster better customer relationships. As a Software as a Service (SaaS) platform, application delivery and user experience is a top priority.
The Challenge in Delivering Quality Performance
As a customer service platform, network quality can affect its customers’ users. Since it is delivered over the Internet, even if the company’s application itself is working well, network quality may degrade perceived performance. “We would encounter situations where our application was working well, but we would still hear customers report slow performance,” says the Vice President of Engineering Operations.
When seeking out a network monitoring solution to track network performance, the company’s primary requirement was to find a solution that could not only measure application performance from many locations, including customer sites, but also one that could identify the root cause of issues anywhere along the path.
Last Mile and First Mile Evaluation Requirements
The platform company’s engineering operations team conducted a thorough evaluation of various products that could measure application delivery and network performance from different parts of the world. Besides the external health check, the team also needed a way to conduct the same measurements from customer environments (last mile) and their own data center (first mile). In addition, powerful troubleshooting capabilities was a high priority evaluation criteria given the critical nature of their service. Among all the options evaluated, only ThousandEyes provided the company with a solution that could report on external health as well as first-mile and last-mile performance.
Identifying an ISP Blind Spot Using ThousandEyes
One morning, ThousandEyes alerted on availability problems to a service that were affecting some customers. In the past, when such problems had occurred, the operations team hadn’t been able to identify issues outside the application stack.
With ThousandEyes, the operations team used Deep Path Analysis to identify specific routers that were dropping packets, all belonging to the same Internet Service Provider (ISP). Stepping back in the timeline, the team saw that the ISP in question connected directly to the company’s hosting provider. A network issue at the edge of their hosting provider was affecting the company’s application performance.
Using the interactive sharing capability, the team shared the view identifying the problem router with their provider, and the provider immediately reacted to the problem. “We were able to examine our hosting provider’s network with a microscope to instantly identify where things were broken and share that data with them, making the entire troubleshooting process much faster and easier than before.”
To maintain customer satisfaction and reduce the impact of performance related outages, the company was searching for a monitoring solution that could adeptly identify the root cause of performance issues in the delivery of their SaaS service. With ThousandEyes, the company now has a solution that provides deep insight into application delivery and equips the operations team to react quickly to problems impacting their customers. ThousandEyes metrics now serve as the ground truth to measure and share SLA metrics with their customers.
Figure 1: The company quickly identified an issue between their hosting provider and their ISP (red interfaces) that resulted in some customers not being able to reach the platform.
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