customer story

Zscaler

Proactively Solving Issues Before They Impact Users

Zscaler is a leader in Cloud Security and helps the world’s leading organizations to securely transform their networks and applications for a mobile and cloud first world. Zscaler operates the world’s largest cloud security platform, protecting thousands of enterprises and government agencies from cyberattacks and data loss.

Zscaler partnered with Catchpoint to:

  • Monitor their business-critical security applications to ensure uptime and performance.
  • Provide third-party validation that they are meeting their SLA requirements.
  • Protect brand reputation of both themselves and their customers.
  • Troubleshoot performance problems in remote geographies around the globe.
Employees:
1,000-5,000
Revenue:
$1.3 Billion
Headquarters:
San Jose, CA
Industry:
IaaS

With Catchpoint, we can instantly appear as an end user in any part of the world even if we don’t have technical resources on demand and replicate the user experience. We can increase time to resolution and solve problem cases on our own in minutes.

Misha Kuperman
,
VP of Cloud Operations

Problem

In providing their Cloud Security Services, Zscaler must always be aware of the end user experience to protect both their own brand, as well as the brands of their various enterprise customers.

Supporting secure and high performing access to the Internet and SaaS applications requires Zscaler’s services to run smoothly from all over the globe at all hours of the day. Therefore, Zscaler needed a digital experience monitoring solution that alerts them of any potential disruptions in the path to those services before they have a business impact, and provides the necessary data and analysis which will allow Zscaler to detect and solve any service issues that arise.

Meanwhile, the monitoring solution must also provide Zscaler and their customers with assurances that the Zscaler security service itself doesn’t impede the end user experience of key enterprise applications. Since Zscaler is in the path between end user and the application, they must be able to provide performance data for every portion of the path. This is especially critical for applications where any delay can cause a major disruption in the customer experience, such as video conference software.

Solution

Given the need to get an outside view of the customer experience as opposed to just the view from within their own network, the Zscaler operations team uses Catchpoint’s active testing platform to emulate what the end user is seeing, with customized alerts set up to notify them of any degradations in the performance of the applications that they’re protecting.

When comparing this functionality to other monitoring tools on the market, Zscaler found that Catchpoint provided much more depth and insight into the performance of network and infrastructure components that affect the end user experience.

With Catchpoint becoming a key part of Zscaler’s operations toolbox, any time a new data center is integrated into their portfolio, they find the closest appropriate node from Catchpoint’s expansive global infrastructure, and immediately begin running tests with alerts to which their NOC can respond.

This expansive node coverage is critical, because depending on where the data center is or where their clients are accessing it from, Zscaler must be able to observe from as close as possible to that location.

To validate that Zscaler’s services are not affecting the performance of the applications that they’re protecting, they rely on Catchpoint’s graphing capabilities to show their client’s direct performance versus through Zscaler. In doing so, they can prove through third-party data that they are not having an adverse effect on the end user experience, and more often, quite the contrary.

Because the Catchpoint nodes are static, Zscaler can filter out extraneous noise over which they have no control, such as congested WiFi networks and small office/home office variability. This way, the Zscaler operations team can zero in on actionable performance data and not get bogged down by trying to figure out what they can and cannot act upon. This greatly improves their time to resolution and problem isolation, particularly in locations such as China and other parts of Asia.

Results

In addition to having accurate and reliable third-party data to prove that they are meeting their SLA requirements, Zscaler has been able to discover performance issues that their own internal observability has not uncovered because the problem didn’t lie directly with their own network or service.

The operations team has also been able to improve their mean time to resolution (MTTR) thanks to Catchpoint’s ability to emulate a customer-facing browser or application, and report in-depth metrics that the team can act on.

"With Catchpoint, we can instantly appear as an end user in any part of the world even if we don’t have technical resources on demand and replicate the user experience. It’s a huge value because it saves us time and removes the dependency on end users, and provides data that can be shared with the customer, network partners, or other parties. We can reduce time to resolution and solve problem cases on our own in minutes," concludes Misha Kuperman, VP of Cloud Operations, Zscaler.