iPipeline
iPipeline is a leading provider of cloud-based solutions for the life insurance industry. Through their SaaS offerings, they accelerate and simplify insurance sales, compliance, operations, and support.
iPipeline partnered with Catchpoint to:
- Perform custom multi-step transaction tests to guarantee customer experience.
- Monitor internal infrastructure at the web server level via Enterprise nodes.
- Avoid service penalties through SLA monitoring.
- Test performance across different user devices.
- Ensure accountability from third-party vendors (e.g., DNS, CDNs, etc.).
Catchpoint is particularly useful for taking internal testing right down to the web server level. We’ve had a couple of instances where one web server out of a pool of four was acting up. With Enterprise nodes, we can do transaction tests of our web pages directly at the server URL level. The thing that’s really great about it is the cost. With Enterprise nodes, the service becomes less expensive than anything you can do with Gomez.
Problem
By providing process automation and seamless integration between every participant in the life insurance industry including carriers, agents, advisor, distributors, and consumers, iPipeline’s innovative solutions enable automated processing for pre-sales, point-of-sale execution of applications, agency management, post-sale support, reporting, and consumer delivery.
In order to provide customers with the best possible performance of their sales software, iPipeline requires an end user experience observability solution that empowers the operations team to proactively test and analyze internal systems with actionable data.
With as many as 50,000 users coming through the platform over the span of a month, any performance issues have the potential to cause significant disruptions in iPipeline’s service delivery, customer experience, and ultimately business goals. Therefore, preempting issues before they can have a serious impact is imperative to iPipeline’s value proposition.
That's why iPipeline depends on Catchpoint's digital experience observability solution.
Solution
Due to the complex nature of the software and infrastructure, iPipeline typically runs 10- to 15-step transaction tests that cover five to ten web pages from start to finish. These tests are run several times every hour, with custom alert settings in place to accommodate for imperfections within the infrastructure and reduce the prevalence of false alerts.
Whenever a problem is detected, the Network Operations Center (NOC) can then delve into the performance analytics within the Catchpoint portal. Catchpoint’s scatterplot graphs are the most useful display function for iPipeline’s needs to isolate the problem, then run instant tests to confirm it.
This functionality is especially important because like most SaaS companies, particularly those in the financial/insurance industries, iPipeline has strict Service Level Agreements (SLAs) with its clientele which require them to meet a minimum standard of performance and availability. Any time they fail to meet those thresholds, it will result in a financial penalty that they have to pay to their customers.
With Catchpoint’s strong active observability capabilities driving these SLA initiatives, they can not only catch these issues before end users are impacted, but also use historical data to identify trends that will help them preempt future problems.
One of the challenges that iPipeline had in the past was pinpointing issues at the server level. The company opted not to use a centralized infrastructure, choosing instead to host their pages in strategic locations around the country. Thus, a failure at the end user level didn’t tell them the root cause of the issue.
However, with Catchpoint’s Enterprise nodes, iPipeline is able to run transaction tests at a granular level to pinpoint the issue quickly and easily.
“Catchpoint is particularly useful for taking internal testing right down to the web server level. We’ve had a couple of instances where one web server out of a pool of four was acting up. With Enterprise nodes, we can do transaction tests of our web pages directly at the server URL level,” said Malcolm Crouch, Senior NOC Manager at iPipeline.
“The thing that’s really great about it is the cost. With Enterprise nodes, the service becomes less expensive than anything you can do with Gomez,” continued Crouch.
Results
Since deploying Catchpoint’s observability solutions, iPipeline has experienced a reduction in downtime as well as an improvement in customer satisfaction rates, thereby driving positive business outcomes.
Under their previous monitoring solution, iPipeline still had to rely primarily on their customers to report outages, at which point the NOC would have to do extensive investigations before they could find the root of the problem. With Catchpoint’s flexible solution at their disposal, iPipeline can now catch these issues before customers do and reduce the time to discovery from hours down to minutes.
