iSeatz – Resolving Performance Issues Faster with Catchpoint

iSeatz, founded in 1999, has evolved from a digital reservation platform for local New Orleans restaurants into a loyalty tech company that integrates travel and lifestyle bookings into point banks for global brands. iSeatz powers one of the top 10 travel platforms in the world, as well as loyalty eCommerce sites for multiple top 5 hotel brands. The iSeatz Oneview Platform handles more than $4 billion and 180 billion loyalty points annually.

Being a B2B2C company, iSeatz represents its clients’ brands, so the platform must be reliable and highly available to its clients’ loyalty members. The company has implemented several effective measures to ensure platform reliability, however, when there is an incident, determining and isolating the cause always proved to be a difficult task. With so many brand partners and suppliers such as rental car agencies, the iSeatz IT team took significant time to resolve issues when something wasn’t working as expected. To empower the team to better identify and resolve platform issues, iSeatz turned to Catchpoint for its solid synthetic monitoring with advanced capabilities that provides more than just uptime information.

“Catchpoint is a robust tool providing significant monitoring capabilities out of the box. Combine this with the impressive support the company gives us, and it’s an investment that delivers great returns.”

Idan Warshawski, VP of Cloud Operations and Information Security, iSeatz

Improved Troubleshooting Capabilities

iSeatz uses Catchpoint to monitor actual end-user experience across the globe relying only on what its testers and engineers in various regions can see. The ability to record tests and the waterfall feature are just some of the Catchpoint features that iSeatz finds valuable. “We can record parts of tests much faster. Plus, the waterfall provides a token that allows us to dig into our logs and other monitoring tools to trace a request from start to finish. We lacked this capability before but can now easily troubleshoot every failure,” says Idan Warshawski, VP of Cloud Operations and Information Security at iSeatz.

iSeatz has to maintain the different integrations with its partners, suppliers, and vendors and when faced with a performance degradation the Cloud Operations team was often unable to troubleshoot effectively. They would find it difficult to somehow replicate such complex issues, relying on trial and error while digging into multiple tools to pinpoint problems. The Cloud Operations team now leverages the Catchpoint platform to monitor integrations and the team finds it easier to detect, escalate and resolve issues, for example, when there is a higher failure rate or a latency originates from a specific integration.

“The Catchpoint filmstrip shows the time to load a test and all associated images, making it far easier to find errors and pinpoint potential reasons,” says Warshawski. For example, if a third-party asset times out or takes too long to load, iSeatz can sort by time and response code in the Catchpoint waterfall view.

Understanding the End-to-End Experience

iSeatz strives to deliver an excellent digital experience on behalf of its brand partners. The company understands that to do so, it must monitor beyond availability and account for many moving parts – including numerous ones beyond its control such as the CDN providers. CDN monitoring is one of the important aspects of the monitoring strategy implemented by the iSeatz team. “Every region uses a different edge making it complicated to test. By setting up Catchpoint nodes in different locations where our customers exist, we can evaluate performance and take action such as spin up a new environment,” says Warshawski.

When infrastructure changes or code changes are made, the Cloud Operations and software engineering share responsibility for analyzing the impact on performance. Catchpoint helps these teams understand the impact of such changes from the end user’s perspective so they can evaluate better and optimize the application.

Summary

With Catchpoint, iSeatz can analyze monitoring data and troubleshoot issues more efficiently. “We needed a tool that provided enough information and capabilities for us to quickly debug issues,” says Warshawski. His team leverages Catchpoint’s powerful monitoring to gain better visibility into the different integrations it enables and to optimize the application delivery chain.

I like that Catchpoint allows us to add monitoring layers and enables us to understand how users are experiencing our platform,” explains Warshawski. Now the entire Cloud Operations team – DevOps, security, release management, and site reliability engineers – use Catchpoint. Read the detailed case study here!