64x faster incident resolution with Catchpoint

This Fortune 500 American multinational corporation designs, manufactures, and distributes engines, filtration, and power generation products. Their mission is to enhance the lives of their customers and communities with their wide range of industry-leading solutions, which sell in almost 200 countries worldwide. While US-headquartered, this multi-billion dollar company employs 60,000 people around the world.

The Fortune 500 company partnered with Catchpoint to:

Investigate a long-running issue its distributed global employee base was struggling with in Salesforce.
Isolate and fix the issue by determining its root cause.
Improve overall workforce productivity.

Employees:

Revenue:

Headquarters:

Industry:

Problem

During the pandemic, the company, like so many worldwide, moved to remote working. A newly distributed workforce, coupled with a code release in their Salesforce application, triggered a series of employee complaints, which were escalated to the Board.

The company’s Enterprise Monitoring Leader delivers Monitoring-as-a-Service to application owners who request visibility for the IT services they deliver to their business partners. He has several monitoring and observability tools at his disposal, amongst them Catchpoint for active observation of customer experience, along with Splunk, and several APM tools (AppDynamics and Dynatrace). The monitoring and observability solution and combination of tools he uses depends on the app owners' requirements.

The organization has a wide distribution network: distributors have branches and branches have dealerships. These dealerships are the first external customers of the business’ Enterprise Monitoring Leader.

The issue impacting Salesforce affected 800 of the company's users distributed across the U.S., all from the ordering departments of the distributors.

Prior to Catchpoint's involvement, seven people from the Application Team were trying to: (i) validate the issue and (ii) identify its cause. This process was challenging for several reasons:

Events were sporadic, not following identifiable patterns.
The issue could not be resolved with the current monitoring stack of point solutions.
The Incident Management team had to work with many different IT groups: Network, End User Computing, Salesforce and Application Developers – in total between 15 and 20 people - to attempt to find a resolution.
The team had been working on the incident, however, for over two months without coming to a resolution.

Solution

At this point, the organization’s Enterprise Monitoring Leader was pulled into incident resolution – two months after the issue had begun. His first point of call was to deploy Catchpoint's Workforce Experience solution including the use of the endpoint agent to see if it could solve the issue. Since it was his first implementation, he packaged and tested the agent, sought approval to deploy it, and soon began deployment via the SCCM software center.

Working with Catchpoint's endpoint agent allowed the Enterprise Monitoring Leader to identify with accuracy that the issue reported was to do with the user’s connectivity to their ISPs, not with the organization’s IT infrastructure, the devices, or the application. This is the reason why monitoring point solutions were unable to isolate the issue in the distributed work environment.

Within hours of investigation, there was enough evidence for the Application Team to diagnose and close the incident, and all teams involved could go back to business as usual.

Results

The outcome of the situation was quite impressive:

800 users of Salesforce impacted by sporadic issues for a total of 3 months.
15-20 people actively working on isolating and fixing the issue.
Within 3 weeks (i.e., 0.7 month), Catchpoint Endpoint Agent was deployed.
Catchpoint allowed one person to diagnose the root cause within hours.
(15 people * 3 months) / (1 person * 0.7 month).

= 64 times faster to get to the root cause with Catchpoint's Workforce Experience solution.