customer story

Qualtrics

Reducing MTTR by 95%

reduction in MTTR

minute issue discovery (from 2 hrs)

Qualtrics is a single system of record for all experience data, allowing organizations to manage the four core experiences of business — customer, product, employee, and brand experiences — on one platform. Over 8,500 enterprises worldwide, including more than 75 percent of the Fortune 100 and 99 of the top 100 U.S. business schools rely on Qualtrics.

To reach their customers and end users worldwide, Qualtrics has an infrastructure presence in every major region consisting of thousands of servers, VMs, and containers, as well as 15 data centers. Their architecture also includes a mix of third-party cloud services such as content delivery networks CDNs and company-owned hardware to manage the delivery of the Qualtrics platform. Qualtrics uses Catchpoint to:

Identify and resolve performance degradations across many global locations.
Test network speed and latency of different third-party providers.
Provide customized alerts for performance issues across their architecture.
Ensure they meet their SLA requirements with their customers.

Employees:

1,000-5,000

Revenue:

$723 Million

Headquarters:

Seattle, WA

Industry:

SaaS Application Monitoring

Because of Catchpoint, we haven't had a single incident in the past year and a half that we didn't discover in less than five minutes. So seeing a drop from two hours to five minutes is a pretty big deal for us.

David Gonzalez

Director of Technical Operations

Problem

Given the complexity of Qualtric’s architecture, including multiple code bases, and multiple internal and external services stretched across several regions, the company must have a single view of the customer experience while still being able to drill down and isolate individual components of their service delivery.

Moreover, to provide the best possible service to their customers, Qualtrics’ operations team must first be able to get a complete understanding of what their end users see on their platform at any given time.

That's why they invested in Catchpoint. Catchpoint nodes enable them to run active observability tests in every major city around the world, including the more remote areas of Europe and Asia that other DEM providers are unable to serve.

Solution

Once the scope of the customer experience is understood, Qualtrics is able to set performance goals for each region. Using the Catchpoint platform, they run constant tests of both their first- and third-party infrastructure, which generate customized email alerts to ensure that they are made aware of any latency or performance degradations in real time.

In addition to collecting performance data, Qualtrics uses the Catchpoint platform to drill down into their test results to uncover the root cause of any performance issue. The advanced analytics features provided by Catchpoint allow them to look at performance data broken down by provider, region, or city in order to understand the scope of the issue.

Additionally, the various graphing capabilities and statistical value filters provide further insight into the nature of the problem. For example, the 95th percentile performance graph allows the Qualtrics operations team to view edge case issues where customers may not have the best possible experience, providing them with a starting point to troubleshoot these issues.

Further, they rely heavily on filmstrips and screenshot capabilities to get a visual representation of when the page becomes usable to a customer, seeing when a page loads versus when the server responds to a browser.

Results

Qualtrics tracks the amount of time it takes to discover and resolve every single incident that affects customers. As a regular process improvement technique, they review these metrics monthly and develop action items for how to reduce the time to discover or the time to fix a problem.

Catchpoint gives them the ability to discover issues as soon as they happen, which results in faster resolution times for their customers and helps them hit their SLAs more consistently every month.

Prior to first using Catchpoint, Qualtrics had been unable to develop any sort of consistency in their time to discovery, which ranged anywhere from 10 minutes to two hours, depending on scope, location, and severity of the problem. Since using Catchpoint, however, there has not been a single issue that the Qualtrics operations team hasn’t been able to detect in less than five minutes.