How a Telecom Leader Streamlined DEM for Reliable Monitoring

Digital experience is a crucial business KPI. A lot depends on the availability, reachability, reliability, and performance of all the services that make up a business irrespective of the industry it caters to and irrespective of the size of its customer base.

From retail, finance to travel and telecommunications, implementing an effective digital experience monitoring (DEM) strategy is vital. Top players in these industries continue to invest in monitoring tools to maintain application performance and service delivery.

One of our customers, a major telecom company, was juggling multiple monitoring tools in an effort to maintain service performance. As part of their efforts to streamline the existing monitoring strategy, the telecom giant turned to Catchpoint.

Many Tools, Ineffective Data Analysis

As in any large company, there are hundreds of different teams within the telecom company handling different services. Each team uses its own set of tools to track performance of the applications it handles. In such a scenario, there is an overarching need for a higher yet granular perspective of performance for all the services it offers. Even with all the performance data from all the monitoring tools, the teams were left scrambling for answers during a crisis. The company needed:

• A unified/streamlined approach for monitoring.
• A monitoring strategy that tracked availability, reachability, reliability, and performance.
• To reduce false positives.
• Comprehensive performance insight across different applications.

Adding Value and Improving Business

Within months of migrating to Catchpoint, there was a big shift in how they monitored different applications and how incidents are handled. Our expertise to monitor and fine-tune performance has been leveraged by most of the teams including SREs, System Engineers, Technical Analysts, and DevOps. These teams are using Catchpoint monitoring for:

• Internal applications such as support portals as well as external websites and billing applications
• Applications used by field engineers
• SLA monitoring
• Monitoring third-party integrations

Improved Monitoring Strategy

Dealing with false positives was a major challenge for the company and they needed a solution with advanced alerting capabilities.

Catchpoint was able to help them implement a more effective monitoring strategy which has cut down false positives significantly and also improved MTTD, the mean time to detect an issue. During a recent incident, the IT team received alerts from Catchpoint well before end-users were impacted.

With hundreds of teams using disparate monitoring tools, Catchpoint has successfully streamlined the monitoring strategy. Different teams within the company are now able to detect and resolve issues faster.

Employee Experience Monitoring

The company uses several third-party services including applications for collaboration and productivity within the organisation. Monitoring these applications for performance issues is critical as it can impact employee productivity.

For example, Google Suite is one such critical application that every employee uses. Any issue with this application can directly impact employee productivity. Catchpoint monitors the GSuite applications to ensure there are no performance issues or SLA breaches and this helps maintain employee experience.

Monitoring Internal/External Portals

A huge enterprise such as this telecom company has hundreds of teams handling hundreds of processes. And all these processes need to be monitored constantly to ensure seamless functioning of each team.

For example, the customer support team relies on an internal ticketing system to handle customer queries and issues. If there is a glitch in the system, it can have an immediate impact on the business. With Catchpoint, the entire workflow from logging into the ticketing portal to viewing, processing and closing tickets, is monitored. Issues are being detected quicker with fewer false positives.

Catchpoint can monitor internal applications that require complex scripts to capture vital data. For example, the company uses an application to manage Work Orders (WO). The application to create a WO is being monitored using transaction scripts that simulate the entire process of creating a WO using drawing tools available in the application. A new WO provides details for network deployment in a specified location. Any performance issue with the WO application will impact productivity which can cause delays in the company’s network deployment plans.

Monitoring the health of HTTP Endpoints

One of the many teams at this telecom company has been assigned the responsibility of monitoring thousands of HTTP endpoints. These endpoints are critical and they need to be able to quickly detect any performance incident as it can directly impact multiple applications.

Catchpoint helped automate the process of setting up and maintaining several thousand tests tracking the endpoint availability and integrated the monitoring data with a singular dashboard.

Such proactive monitoring proved critical for the success of major events last year such as Black Friday, Cyber Monday, and even during the launch of a major new campaign.

Comprehensive Data Visualization

The lack of a standardized monitoring strategy made it difficult to correlate data from different monitoring tools. Even with all the performance data coming in, the SREs, Analysts, and DevOps teams were unable to infer anything effective or impactful.

The telecom company wanted a single dashboard that would aggregate data from multiple tests. Such a dashboard makes it easier to detect performance degradation and to perform root cause analysis.

Catchpoint built a custom dashboard that tracks the performance of multiple internal applications. The dashboard displays the health of different applications on a single pane using color codes. It provides a quick performance snapshot of all critical applications.

Real Results of Improved Digital Experience

Migrating to Catchpoint had a real business impact on the telecom company, not only did we help improve application performance with better alerting strategies and better data analysis, but we were also able to improve the customer’s business KPIs. Within months of migrating to Catchpoint, the customer reported the following:

• Performance improvements across multiple applications resulting in 88,600 hours annual savings
• Fifteen potential outages were prevented which has saved 7,500 hours of productivity
• Identified delays in issue resolution and improved performance by 93%, saving 800 hours annually
• Detected performance degradation post-migration to AWS
• The end-user experience has been improved after multiple UI performance issues were identified

The tools used to monitor were streamlined making it easier to troubleshoot incidents as they do not rely on disparate sources of data for root cause analysis. Most of the teams within the company are now using a unified monitoring tool which has helped them gain a more comprehensive performance perspective.

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