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Case Studies |
VisualPulse Case Study - Lonely Planet Publications
Lonely Planet Publications employs around 400 staff across our offices in Melbourne, London, Paris & Oakland. Lonely Planet is one of the most successful guidebook and travel information providers in the world and has been in business for 30 years.
In early 2003, we began to experience poor performance on some of our data links - VPN links to our overseas offices and across the public Internet to certain sites. We suspected excessive packet loss was to blame but found it difficult to establish a credible historical record of the events. We tinkered with dumping test script outputs to a file but couldn't easily manipulate the results into a meaningful report. Hence we began to investigate programs that could detect, log and alert us to episodes of grief without going to the bother and expense of writing an in-house application.
After reading Internet reviews and talking to peers, we decided to trial the evaluation version of VisualPulse Web Edition. In a short time, we determined that the reviews we had read were correct - that the product performed very well indeed. We were instantly able to see exactly what links were suffering, over what period and to what extent, setting thresholds on what's acceptable re latency and packet loss to reference against SLAs.
We ended up forwarding these reports to our then ISP who quickly agreed on rectification measures. Importantly, the reports also showed when our ISP was not to blame, adding credibility to our claims. Having the ability to detect problems before the users did was a great plus too. The alerting works well, sending e-mails to certain boxes which we then have triggering SMSs as required.
The VisualPulse 10-element license we have for each site more than covers our need to detect routes between our overseas offices, co-lo sites, major B2B partners and other "test destinations".
It's all about the customised reports - they're great! Being able to group by time period, certain links, etc gets you generating the report you need with just a few clicks. It's so easy, even a manager can do it...!
Grant Baxter, BCSE
Global IT Operations Manager
Lonely Planet Publications