customer story

Tealium

Using Observability to Drive Agile CDN Strategy

Tealium is a SaaS company that helps marketers capture, analyze, and manage data across their digital properties. Tealium’s Universal Data Hub, which comprises an enterprise tag management solution, an omnichannel customer segmentation and action engine, and a suite of rich data services, requires a robust Digital Experience Management (DEM) tool to provide them with real-time data on the health of all their online systems.

Starting with the Tealium iQ™ tag management solution, performance has been a driving motivator for Tealium from the beginning. The company partnered with Catchpoint to:

  • Investigate and monitor a multi-content delivery network (CDN) architecture to ensure the fastest possible content delivery.
  • Obtain in-depth analytics about how end users around the world see how content on the page is rendered.
  • Provide neutral third-party analysis to validate their service delivery with prospects and customers.
  • Confirm that they are meeting service level agreement (SLA) obligations for their customers.
  • Benchmark performance against their competition to ensure their superiority of service.

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Employees:
500-1,000
Revenue:
$227 Million
Headquarters:
San Diego, CA
Industry:
SaaS Application Monitoring

The tool has definitely paid for itself. Every year, we up our volume with Catchpoint. If it wasn't easy to use and it didn't do the job, we’d move on to other tools. The fact that we've stayed with Catchpoint for so long means we've been very satisfied with the features, with the capabilities, and with the ease of use.

Mike Anderson
,
CTO and Founder

Problem

In order to provide real-time data from around the world for their customers – including those behind the Chinese firewall – Tealium had to deliver flawless performance to end users around the globe.

To deliver on this strategy, the company need to not only run active observability tests, but also research and benchmark the performance of different service providers. That's why Thallium selected Catchpoint's powerful digital experience observability solution.

Solution

Access to advanced analytics from infrastructure all over the globe was particularly important to the success of Tealium’s first product, a tag management solution. The company pioneered a multi-CDN strategy designed to select the best possible CDN provider in any region worldwide.

When building this architecture, Tealium relied on Catchpoint to do the investigative work. By drilling down into the performance analytics of those CDNs, Tealium could make well-informed decisions about which provider was the best option in a particular geographic location.

Moreover, the fastest CDN in a specific location fluctuates depending on network variables, which meant that Tealium needed the agility to switch CDN providers in response. Catchpoint played a crucial role in driving that analysis, not only through its intuitive active observability and alerting system, but also via its global observer node footprint, which enabled Tealium to monitor remote places such as Russia and mainland China.

Given the complicated nature of these systems and the challenge of efficiently monitoring them all, the biggest differentiator for Catchpoint was its ease of use.

“When I went and used Catchpoint for the first time, it just seemed very easy. It seemed very sensible, and I was able to set up tests and create the monitors very quickly,” says Tealium CTO and Founder Mike Anderson. “And the reports were just a significant degree easier to use, and I would say even more self-service.”

Also crucial to the Tealium operations team was the end-to-end visibility offered in every Catchpoint test, from the waterfall charts that highlight bottlenecks in the rendering of a page, to the film strip view that shows an exact replica of what the user is experiencing at each stage of the rendering process (example below).

Results

Thanks to Catchpoint’s advanced and intuitive scripting capability, widespread observer node coverage, real-time analytics, and customizable alerting system specifically designed to weed out false positives, Tealium was able to set up a multi-CDN architecture that positioned them to become the industry leaders in tag management and data collection.

Catchpoint was also willing to work directly with Tealium to meet specific needs for feature adoption and enhancement, providing the necessary agile product development needed to keep up with the changing IT landscape.

“The tool has definitely paid for itself. Every year, we up our volume with Catchpoint,” declares Anderson. “If it wasn't easy to use and it didn't do the job, we’d move on to other tools. The fact that we've stayed with Catchpoint for so long means we've been very satisfied with the features, with the capabilities, and with the ease of use.”