customer story

Smartsheet

Smartsheet + Catchpoint = Greater Visibility Into End User Experience

Smartsheet is a collaborative work platform for dynamic work, aligning people and technology to improve productivity. Many enterprises, including major Fortune 500 companies, use Smartsheet to streamline and simplify work management. Smartsheet integrates with applications from Microsoft, Google, Salesforce, and many others.

Smartsheet worked with Catchpoint to:

·     Track the health of external and internal services.

·     Ensure the end-user experience.

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Employees:
1,915 employees
Revenue:
$385 million
Headquarters:
Bellevue, WA
Industry:
SaaS

Catchpoint has made my job a lot easier in a number of ways. It's very easy to tweak a node group so that I can add more nodes, remove nodes and target specific regional areas. A number of features like that, which allow us to bring tests in as needed, have been immense. We're on top of things a lot of times before our customers are aware there's an issue.

Jason Kehr
,
Engineering Manager

Problem

The following case study is based on an interview with Jason Kehr, engineering manager at Smartsheet. It has been edited for clarity.

My name is Jason Kehr and I'm an engineering manager at Smartsheet. I'm a senior site reliability engineer (SRE) and that means that I monitor the stack health, network, scaling, general performance, handling patching, and release deployment of that platform. In the beginning, we didn't have an observability team. It was just a group of SREs all sitting in a room with a bunch of monitors looking at metrics all day long responding to alerts. So, it's critical that we have good inside monitoring and also outside monitoring. That's why we use Catchpoint for the external, and some other stacks for internal. Without active observability, we would not have a clear understanding of what our customers are doing and what they're experiencing. And a lot of these companies use Smartsheet to run their business.

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Solution

Catchpoint has made my job a lot easier in a number of ways. We're on top of things a lot of times before our customers are aware there's an issue - we've been able to get in front of that. And it's very easy to tweak a group of observer nodes so that I can add more nodes, remove nodes, and target specific regional areas if we need to.  Features like that, which allow us to bring tests in as needed have been immense. We had an incident a while back with a specific customer in Australia. They were having issues resolving to our platform. And ultimately it occurred to us like, "Oh, we've got Catchpoint sitting right here for us. Let's just go ahead and spin up a test. We'll include all of the Australian nodes and then we'll run the test." And that took all of about five minutes.

On top of that, Catchpoint integrates with a number of the other systems that we use to monitor the performance or respond to any incidents that come up with our platform.

Results

The Catchpoint team has been critical in providing us support in introducing, establishing, and getting to the point we are. As such, it's been pretty easy to get other teams to adopt Catchpoint for their external monitoring. Initially, we had little or no outside monitoring capabilities. So being able to show an immediate benefit, they recognized that they have visibility now into the external performance - through simple to complex tests - that really allowed them to see how our platform is performing.

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