customer story

iSeatz

iSeatz Calls Upon Catchpoint Digital Experience Monitoring to Rapidly Resolve Issues and Ensure Its Platform Delivers

iSeatz is a loyalty tech company that integrates travel and lifestyle bookings into point banks for global brands. Leveraging the iSeatz Oneview Platform, loyalty members can use points, cash, or a combination of the two to book flights, hotels, rental cars, and purchase tours, activities, and food delivery. iSeatz processes more than $4 billion and 180 billion loyalty points annually.

ISeatz worked with Catchpoint to:

  • Troubleshoot every failure
  • Pinpoint problems originating with third parties
  • Overdeliver for clients
  • Validate content delivery network (CDN) performance
  • Understand the end-to-end experience
  • Integrate with key tools

Employees:
321 employees
Revenue:
$67 Million
Headquarters:
New Orleans, LA
Industry:
SaaS Application Monitoring

Catchpoint is a robust tool providing significant monitoring capabilities out of the box. Combine this with the impressive support the company gives us, and it’s an investment that delivers great returns.

Idan Warshawski
,
VP of Cloud Operations and Information Security

Problem

As a B2B2C company,  iSeatz essentially represents its clients’ brands, so the platform must be reliable and highly available to its clients’ loyalty program members.

According to Idan Warshawski, vice president of cloud operations and information security for iSeatz, “Consumers expect an experience on our platform that is the same caliber as transacting directly with these brands. If a brand’s reward members can’t complete an activity via our platform, they lose trust in the brand, so we must do everything we can to maintain that trust on behalf of our clients.”

While iSeatz takes numerous measures to ensure a reliable platform, it’s not always easy to determine whether a problem has been caused by a brand partner, suppliers such as rental car agencies, or iSeatz itself. Because the team’s previous tool lacked a solid active observability option and provided only information about uptime, it took considerable time to resolve issues when something wasn’t working as expected. “We needed a tool that provided enough information and capabilities for us to quickly debug issues,” says Warshawski.

Solution

Based on a supplier’s recommendation, Warshawski evaluated Catchpoint’s Real User Monitoring (RUM) and active observability solutions. “I like that Catchpoint allows us to add monitoring layers and enables us to understand how users are experiencing our platform,” he says.  Now the entire Cloud Operations team – DevOps, security, release management, and site reliability engineers – use Catchpoint. The Cloud Operations team is a major contributor for iSeatz meeting its SLAs and the first line of defense when something goes wrong, managing and escalating incidents. Through Catchpoint alerts, the teams can stay atop system uptime and performance, and satisfy Warshawski’s desire that they not just meet SLAs but overdeliver.

Troubleshooting every failure

With Catchpoint, iSeatz understands the actual end user experience globally instead of relying on what its testers and engineers in various regions can see. According to Warshawski, the ability to record tests and the waterfall feature are incredibly valuable Catchpoint features.

“We can record parts of tests much faster. Plus, the waterfall provides a token that allows us to dig into our logs and other monitoring tools to trace a request from start to finish. We lacked this capability before but can now easily troubleshoot every failure,” Warshawski says.

The Cloud Operations team is alerted when something goes wrong according to synthetic tests. “We integrate with partners, suppliers and vendors, and when a higher failure rate or latency originates from one of them, we want to catch it, escalate it, and resolve it as soon as possible,” continues Warshawski. Using Catchpoint, iSeatz can do just that. In the past, the Cloud Operations team had to somehow replicate such issues. This could be challenging, requiring lots of trial and error and digging into multiple tools to pinpoint problems. “The Catchpoint filmstrip shows the time to load a test and all associated images, making it far easier to find errors and pinpoint potential reasons,” Warshawski says. For example, if a third-party asset times out or takes too long to load, iSeatz can sort by time and response code in the Catchpoint waterfall view.

Validating CDN performance

iSeatz takes pride in delivering an excellent digital experience on behalf of its brand partners. To do so, it must account for many moving parts – including numerous ones beyond its control. Beyond page load times, JavaScript errors, and third-party asset performance, this includes CDNs.

Warshawski underscores that CDNs don’t behave the same around the world. “Every region uses a different edge, making it complicated to test. By setting up Catchpoint nodes in different locations where our customers exist, we can evaluate performance and take action such as spin up a new environment,” says Warshawski.

Understanding the end-to-end experience

While the SLA and Cloud Operations teams analyze performance when infrastructure changes are made, Cloud Operations and software engineering share responsibility for analyzing the performance of the code changes. “We believe each engineer has a responsibility for understanding how their changes impact our platform. With Catchpoint, they can conduct spot tests and understand the impact from the development cycle all the way to users,” continues

Warshawski. Moreover, iSeatz can integrate Catchpoint solutions with other key tools to enable robust monitoring. Due to the synergies between Catchpoint and other applications used by the Cloud Operations team, iSeatz gains enhanced alerting and easy access to additional data for investigating potential issues.

Results

From Warshawski’s perspective, the combination of Catchpoint active observability and real user monitoring is incredibly valuable. “Synthetic monitoring enables us to make data-informed decisions, while RUM lets us easily see the performance of different scenarios and edge cases. This includes comparing cities and continents, comparing specific pages, and more,” he says.

According to Warshawski, iSeatz can now identify problems within seconds of seeing the image in Catchpoint, instantly know the source, and quickly activate the team to resolve issues more rapidly. “When weighing the potential loss of transactions, reputation and partner satisfaction against the cost of Catchpoint, the value is clear,” he continues. Moreover, Warshawski finds equal value in Catchpoint as a partner. “Catchpoint works closely with us to help us achieve our goals. It’s clear the company wants us to succeed. It’s a true partnership,” he concludes.