Xandr

Since first deploying Catchpoint’s observability solution back in 2010 with 10-15 tests, Xandr now uses Catchpoint as its primary observability solution across all core products. Xandr now runs more than 700 regularly scheduled tests, and more than 500 employees use Catchpoint tools.

Xandr's global user base means that Catchpoint’s industry-leading node coverage is a critical differentiator for them. The ability to replicate and measure the actual end user experience regardless of geography allows Xandr to detect performance issues – whether they’re rooted in the application, a third party, or at the network level – before users are impacted. Catchpoint’s solutions provide critical value in several ways:

• ‍Catchpoint’s waterfall chart. This helps the company understand the performance of every page, as well as the behavior of every object on the page and how each one affects other objects. To do this, Xandr relies on many different test types offered within Catchpoint’s active observability solution to get granular data about a specific IT functionality. These tests include browser emulation, API, transaction, DNS, traceroute, and ping.
• ‍Enterprise observer nodes. Xandr has deployed these nodes in specific data centers behind the firewall, allowing IT to view and identify issues within the network and understand the application performance without internet noise muddying the results.
• ‍Real user measurement (RUM). The active observability tests are complemented by Catchpoint’s RUM tool, which captures and aggregates real-time user experience data. This helps IT visualize what actual client requests look like as they hit the Xandr platform from different parts of the world. Additionally, Catchpoint’s RUM solution allows Xandr to aggregate data based on custom metrics, which is something that other tools could not provide. The RUM solution also includes the “time to first interaction” metric. This is incredibly important because whenever an end user browses any of Xandr's apps, it calls on their API to download all the data. This needs to be monitored so that Xandr can make sure that all the data is loading properly and that there’s visual completion of the page once all the data from the request and sub requests has been loaded.
• ‍Speeding data analytics. This has been proven instrumental to increasing usage within the company, onboarding a new user is very fast and simple. Once they’re up to speed, Catchpoint’s powerful analytics tool allows Xandr employees to slice and dice the data however they’d like to identify the root cause of the problem. From there, sharing the information both internally and externally is easy, fast, and effective.
• ‍Advanced features. Many of Catchpoint’s advanced features have also proven invaluable. The available alerting options ping IT at different steps of the transactions and on different scenarios within the same test. Pertinent alerts are sent to different teams based on specific conditions. And by using the ‘bring your own visualization’ feature, Xandr can use custom metrics and visualizations right within the Catchpoint portal.

Finally, the critical Smartboard feature has played a significant role in reducing Xandr's mean time to resolution (MTTR). Smartboard gives the company a single place to look at data and do root cause analysis without clicking on several different links or exiting the portal. This allows them to quickly isolate performance issues based on factors such as geography, ISP, and application, and accelerate root cause discovery.