Customer Story
US-Based Application Provider
Leading Salesforce Application Partner Improves AWS Visibility with ExtraHop
Improved user experience through proactive troubleshooting
Better visibility into application activity in AWS
More cost-effective management of AWS resources
The Beginning
Provider wanted to better understand their utilization of AWS resources
ExtraHop has fundamentally changed the way that we monitor and manage our business.
Director of IT
,
US-Based Application Provider
The Transformation
ExtraHop provided deeper visibility into their wire data
The company turned to ExtraHop to analyze all of its real-time wire data — all application communications including full bi-directional transaction payloads — something that no other management or monitoring tool had been able to offer, especially for a predominately AWS environment.
"I spoke with over a dozen monitoring companies at the Interop Conference," said one of their systems engineers. "But only ExtraHop didn't turn me away when I said we're primarily on AWS. They said, 'Not a problem at all, we have an appliance out there, go ahead and fire up a free version for yourself.'"
The team went on to purchase the ExtraHop platform to diagnose internal problems, measure the impact of Salesforce latency, and create a live geomap that shows merges and the associated geographic locale in near real time.
Fewer "Unknown Unknowns"
Before ExtraHop, the team lacked insight into how its applications were behaving in AWS. Now, they can see the volume of traffic in Regions and Availability Zones and understand when and why auto-scaling events occur.
"ExtraHop has given us visibility that's led to eye-opening moments," says the Director of IT. "Even during the ExtraHop demo with our testing environment, we happened to notice an incorrect configuration that wouldn't have affected customers but could have caused us development headaches. Being able to pinpoint that cause so quickly really sold us on the value — and that alone justified our investment."
Deeper, More Meaningful Data
The company's application is very modern in its use of asynchronous connections, and many built-in monitoring tools do not provide the level of detailed visibility needed to troubleshoot and tune the application.
"When I saw ExtraHop's ability to create custom triggers with JavaScript, that sold me — especially combined with custom metrics," says a manager of Product Development. "When we left the ExtraHop demo, I couldn't stop talking about the different things I wanted to do with it."
The Outcome
Provider is equipped with more information to quickly diagnose problems and better manage AWS resources
ExtraHop has helped the team reduce business risk, improve mean-time-to-resolution, proactively address service degradation, and optimize AWS resources for greater efficiency and lower costs.
Real-Time Insights for Better Customer Experiences
Equipped with insight from their wire data, the team is now more proactive in responding to issues. They have set email alerts based on performance thresholds, and have also set up video screens throughout the office that display live data from ExtraHop, with custom metrics such as "Merges by Device." Business analysts — representatives who work closely with customers to help them use their applications — now know when a performance slowdown is due to Salesforce and proactively notify customers about the issue.
"When we come into the office, one of the first things we do now is turn on the TVs with the ExtraHop dashboards. We are always watching them to see user experience, activity levels, and application behavior in AWS. ExtraHop has fundamentally changed the way that we monitor and manage the business."
More Cost-Effective AWS Management
An unnoticed increase in errors can lead to unnecessary — and costly — automatic provisioning of new AWS compute resources. "That was our first win with ExtraHop," says the product development manager. "I walked around the corner and saw this huge spike in requests on our screen. We found and were able to solve the problem before it could cause an auto-scale event."
Fast Time-to-Value
The company was able to quickly realize value from ExtraHop due to an easy installation and intuitive interface.
"ExtraHop was very simple to set up and install. Especially the ease of configuration, installing the packet forwarders, and the fact that ExtraHop has an AWS image out on the Marketplace — so all I had to do was fire it up, and it did everything."
"The interface is clean, modern, and supports drag-and-drop actions. The built-in HTML 5 elements make it very easy to create visualizations of our wire data. I've used tools such as Splunk and Nagios, and ExtraHop is worlds apart in terms of how quickly you can get up to speed, how quickly you can get useful data out of your environment."