Equinix
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Equinix is a leader in the digital infrastructure space, providing a platform that guarantees flexibility, scalability, and security. Top-tier enterprises, software as a service (SaaS), and cloud providers rely on Equinix to deliver services and expect no compromise when it comes to digital performance.
Equinix is a neutral co-location and data center provider. “The fundamental idea of Equinix was to create a place where competitive networks could come together and share data in a secure way,” explains Kelsey Waters of Cloud Operations. Equinix includes its subset, Equinix Metal. Equinix Metal provides bare metal services in a consumption-based model, similar to public clouds but in a bare metal fashion (Catchpoint is itself a customer).
Digital performance is crucial to Equinix, as they help customers scale businesses with agility and ease, without worrying about critical infrastructure. With more than 220 data centers in over 26 locations worldwide, Equinix strives to maintain 99.9% uptime. Equinix partnered with Catchpoint to:
- Ensure service reliability.
- Offer customers insights into observability and performance trends.
- Maintain consistent availability and reachability.
- Provide a full picture of the internet.
Catchpoint gives Equinix a more complete picture of internet visibility into what's going on in the network, and that helps the company solve problems more quickly and communicate problems with clarity for customers. With Catchpoint, Equinix is able to identify and diagnose issues in a matter of minutes and begin to correct them before they become larger problems for end users.
Problem
The following customer story summarizes interviews with Kelsey Waters, Senior Director of Cloud Operations, and Jeremy Brooks, Senior Director of Customer Success. They have been edited for clarity.
Equinix’s customers are the most innovative and technology-driven companies in the entire world. They are looking for technology capabilities that can drive their businesses, create new markets, and defend their leadership position. Equinix’s edge cloud services help by using strategically distributed data centers to reduce latency and deliver a better end-user experience.
Kelsey Waters explains, “It’s critically important that we monitor all of our services all the time and that we be the first to announce when there’s some kind of problem; ideally first to resolve; and then, importantly, that we know quickly what the cause of the problem is and within whose domain of responsibility it lies.”
She continues, “A couple of years ago, Equinix Metal was looking for a partner who would help us monitor for these kinds of events; who would help us be aware of latency issues; who would help us improve mean time to resolution. We ultimately decided to partner with Catchpoint.”
When discussing common latency issues and troubleshooting, Jeremy Brooks explained the presence of bottlenecks, pinch points, and other traps across the internet Equinix had to be aware of. “We were looking for a tool that we could partner with our customers on to help identify where those pinch points occurred. And I think that’s why we ultimately settled on Catchpoint,” says Brooks.
Many of Equinix’s customers are SaaS providers that deliver their applications over Equinix’s network and infrastructure, which makes high network performance a core tenet for the company. Equinix’s customers demand high performance and operational efficiency so they can deliver consistent service.
Solution
To ensure customers provide the best end-user experience, Equinix services must consistently run at peak levels. That’s why they invested in Catchpoint’s end user observability solution to stay ahead of any network-impacting incident.
“We live in a world where networks matter,” says Brooks “A lot of people don’t realize that networks matter but everything you do touches the internet in some form or fashion. What Catchpoint has been able to do is give use that full picture, the full picture of the internet and its weather.” He adds, “It’s almost like our radar or our Next Generation Weather Radar (NEXRAD) for our customers.”
Equinix uses Catchpoint solutions in the following ways:
- Proactive Customer Experience observability allows the company to detect and resolve incidents extremely quickly, with minimum service impact.
- Network Experience observability capabilities let the company detect performance degradations worldwide that could have a significant impact on its customers.
- Consistent and continuous observability help the organization quickly pinpoint the source of a network latency, determine whether a third-party service is responsible for that latency, and if the issue is limited to a specific region or network type.
- Streamlined, more effective incident management. Equinix uses its digital experience observability tool’s alerting capabilities to ensure that the right teams are notified should any incident occur. This speeds up troubleshooting and resolution time.
- Dashboards offer a single-pane visualization of performance across the network and infrastructure, which gives the different teams in the organization a quick view of overall performance.
Results
Equinix has taken to bringing Catchpoint and the data it provides to customers, both as a pre-sales tool and as a consultative service. Equinix can show customers a snapshot of service health and use advanced data analytics capabilities to give additional visibility into the customer experience. This allows the organization to optimize its service based on what works for a specific cloud environment.
“Catchpoint gives Equinix a more complete picture of internet visibility into what's going on in the network, and that helps the company solve problems more quickly and communicate problems with clarity for customers. With Catchpoint, Equinix is able to identify and diagnose issues in a matter of minutes and begin to correct them before they become larger problems for end users,” says Kelsey Waters.