customer story

Acquia

Catchpoint’s Global Observability Data Helps Demonstrate Value for Acquia

Acquia provides the leading cloud platform for building, delivering, and optimizing digital experiences. As part of the platform, Acquia offers the Acquia Cloud Edge Content Delivery Network (CDN), which is instrumental in helping their customers deliver world-class customer experiences for their global clients.

Acquia partnered with Catchpoint to:

  • Garner insight into customers’ global site performance, both with and without the Acquia Cloud Edge CDN solution.
  • Provide a pre-sales enablement tool for the Edge CDN service.
  • Share independent performance data with clients and prospects.
  • Perform external network validation.

Employees:
1,500 employees
Revenue:
$200+ million
Headquarters:
Boston, MA
Industry:
SaaS Application Monitoring

The digital experience observability solution that we were looking for needed to be easy enough for casual users to understand. We had seen and evaluated other available tools. Some of them were harder to use because they were using older technologies, first-generation web apps. Others did not have the level of configurability that we were looking for. What we found with Catchpoint was ease of use: ease of configurability, ease of running tests, and ease of generating reports with beautiful charts.

Gary Wu
,
Principal Product Manager

Problem

To demonstrate Cloud Edge CDN’s value, Acquia uses a digital experience observability tool to show how a site will perform both with and without their CDN platform. To guarantee objectivity and credibility, they need an unbiased third-party solution that not only provides in-depth analytics of site performance but also does so on a platform that makes it easy to gather, understand, and share the data. “What we found with Catchpoint was ease of use: ease of configurability, ease of running tests, and ease of generating reports with beautiful charts,” says Gary Wu, principal product manager of Acquia Cloud Edge.

Solution

Acquia runs synthetic benchmarks using Catchpoint to demonstrate how a client’s site will perform with the CDN solution versus without it. The benchmark results enable Acquia to show clients the performance benefits of using Acquia Cloud Edge CDN to cache and place content as close to the site visitor as possible.

When configuring these tests, Acquia takes advantage of the test templates that Catchpoint offers to accelerate initial test creation, and then customizes the test to the client or prospect that they’re working with. In this case, it means taking advantage of any number of the following features:

  • Filmstrip view to see exactly what the end user experiences as the page renders and make debugging tests easier.
  • Log file view to see where a test took longer than expected.
  • Waterfall charts to easily identify bottlenecks and other poorly performingpage elements.
  • Multi-browser support to compare how browser behavior affects the renderingof the page.
  • Report generation to visualize and quantify the results of their tests.
  • Statistical values such as median and 95th percentile to un-skew wide-angle results that are being affected by isolated problems.

Acquia also relies on Catchpoint’s industry-leading global network of 800-plus observer nodes, which aligns with the company’s global market presence.  “What's also great about Catchpoint is the fact that we're able to serve our global customer base leveraging the global test nodes that are available within the Catchpoint platform,” Wu says. “For example, we have Global 1,000 companies in North America that are interested in understanding how fast their sites will load when viewed from Europe or Asia, and we’re  easily able to show those details by running benchmarks from Catchpoint’s worldwide nodes to highlight the performance improvements they’ll see with Acquia Cloud Edge CDN.”

The ability to run tests from locations that are local to that of actual customers makes Acquia’s test results much more accurate and relevant than they would be with any other monitoring platform. Once test results are generated and reviewed, Acquia shares that data and the accompanying visuals with their customers and prospects through custom reports, or via the public URL feature, which allows Catchpoint users to share test results quickly and easily.

Results

Catchpoint has become an integral part of the Acquia Cloud Edge CDN sales process, both as a pre-sales enablement tool and during the solution evaluation process. Acquia can help customers or prospects understand the level of performance improvement that can be delivered through the CDN, which helps demonstrate the compelling value of their service. As an additional benefit, Acquia has also been able to use Catchpoint to help customers experiencing site performance challenges by conducting external network validation.

Since implementing these processes, Acquia has been able to provide their customers and prospects with hard, objective data that validates their Edge CDN value proposition, making it much easier for their solution architects and sales engineers to give their customers a sense of what their site performance can be and what their return on investment will be.