customer story

Radial

Spending More Time On Strategy, Less On Troubleshooting

Reduction in page load time

Reduction in employee workload

Radial is the leader in omnichannel commerce technology and operations, enabling companies to exceed customer expectations and maximize profits by enhancing the digital shopping experience. Their four primary lines of business include Omnichannel Technology, Payments and Fraud, Fulfillment and Freight, and Customer Care.

Radial partnered with Catchpoint to:

Observe global performance at every step of a customer transaction.
Identify and understand the cause of any network connectivity issue.
Measure availability and response time to create an objective measure.

Employees:

5,000-10,000

Revenue:

$608.7 Million

Headquarters:

King of Prussia, PA

Industry:

eCommerce

SaaS Application Monitoring

We investigated every single failure that was occurring and we found a lot of issues we didn't know we had. Finding those problems we didn't know we had was one of those things that really helped us get to an industry-leading level of availability.

Norm Morrison

Director of Technology Operations

Problem

Radial ensures that each step of a consumer’s online purchase becomes a seamlessly orchestrated customer experience. Their solutions – which aim to enable payments, prevent fraud, ensure quality customer care, and facilitate fulfillment and freight – all necessitate various measures of digital experience observability.

Radial facilitates clients’ around-the-clock business transactions that require constant health checks. Radial needed a digital observability solution to ensure consistency and reliability so they could provide the best customer experience possible.

Using Catchpoint gave Radial the opportunity to receive access to comprehensive test types, integrated active and real user observability features, real time granular analytics, and the most diverse node network available.

Solution

With clients around the world that rely on revenue generated from online transactions, Radial must make sure each digital purchase is successful. Through Catchpoint’s digital experience observability platform, Radial designed the Test Product Purchase, which is a multi-step transaction that completes a full purchase on each website to determine the site’s availability.

This form of active observability allows Radial to proactively monitor global service performance for all of their clients’ eCommerce sites. The data collected can be used to create reports for Radial’s clients so they can stay informed on the health of their websites as well.

Radial runs over 500 tests in Catchpoint across a wide variety of nodes. They collect data from public nodes that are located on the Internet backbone and on the last mile, as well as on premises nodes to monitor their own internal systems behind the firewall. These different node offerings allow Radial to successfully integrate the Catchpoint digital experience observability platform with their own technologies.

"Once we got to an acceptable noise level we investigated every single failure that was occurring and we found a lot of issues we didn't know we had. Finding those problems, we didn't know we had was one of those things that really helped us get to an industry-leading level of availability," said Norm Morrison, Director of Technology Operations, Radial.

Catchpoint also gives Radial the capacity to use their own internal data mart. They use a combination of the Catchpoint pull push APIs to drive real-time health dashboards in their network operation center (NOC). Radial was able to unite company application and infrastructure leaders by informing them how to use Catchpoint’s platform, so they could all work towards a common goal of improving the availability and response time service levels.

"We realized that the NOC had to look at every failure and then my team was investigating them again for SLA reclassification as well, so we were doing double the work. To eliminate this duplicate effort, we used the Catchpoint API (the pull API specifically) to build a tool for the NOC so that they could do the reclassification in real time as the issues were investigated. It took a huge load off of my team so that they could spend more time investigation longer term, more serious problems," said Morrison.

Results

Catchpoint changed Radial’s culture by revealing the truth about web performance: that every mistake shouldn’t go unnoticed and every mistake counts.

“What that caused people to do is better prepare and better execute the changes they were making,” says Morrison.

Through the use of active testing as the single source of truth for operational monitoring, reporting, and SLA measurement, Radial was able to uncover and solve a number of performance issues. These issues included web layer stability, application error rates, database performance issues, a firewall/load balancer configuration issue, and intermittent transaction errors.

Catchpoint’s unparalleled digital experience observability platform empowered Radial to quickly pinpoint the cause(s) of issues and prevent them from continuing.

Catchpoint’s active observability tools were necessary to allow Radial to perform root cause analysis and fix issues. In one instance, a client of Radial which has a significant customer base in China received several complaints from their China-based users regarding poor site performance. Radial’s existing monitoring tools only allowed the company to receive data about lagging performance, yet without indication of a cause.

After using Catchpoint’s solution, which provides holistic insight of service delivery through a data driven digital experience system, Radial was able to easily pinpoint, through viewing waterfall data, what was causing the load time in China to be 10x longer than it was in the U.S.