MAKING A BUSINESS CASE FOR PERFORMANCE ANALYTICS

IN THE WORLD

OF IT OPS, TIME

IS MONEY.

Businesses, both online and brick-and-mortar, are constantly

updating their technologies to attract more customers and keep up

with competition. While this approach can certainly be beneficial in

customer acquisition, the process creates complicated issues for

the IT department, which is already struggling against budget cuts

and departmental downsizing.

IT is a cost center where it's expected to do more using less money.

It is bogged-down by requests and demands for new features, a

faster website, to scale infrastructure, and create an overall better

product or service; meanwhile, the IT budget is among the first to

be cut within a company and the average team size is dwindling.

Considering the fact that there are less people and more work in IT

Ops, time is a rare and valuable commodity; for this reason, digital

performance analytics has evolved from a mere "insurance policy"

for good measure to an absolute necessity for businesses.

A COSTLY SHIFT

IN IT OPERATIONS

There are a lot of costs associated with IT because of the

department’s dynamic nature. With constant change comes an

increase in risk, so deploying a monitoring solution is key to

maintaining e�ciency and mitigating unnecessary expenses.

When the Great Recession hit several years ago, the IT industry was

hit with a severe decrease in spending. When budget cuts are

imposed, manpower is decreased and scalability is stunted. A smaller

team with little room for growth puts more of a strain on the

remaining members of the team, ultimately increasing the risk of

human error. The cost of even the smallest mistakes adds up; human

error accounts for approximately $380,000 of a business's annual IT

costs.

There are other factors that drive up the IT Ops price tag that

actually come from external entities. Vendors such as CDNs, DNS

providers, and third party tags play a major role in this segment

because they add complexity to your network. With complexity

comes risk, and with risk comes increased expenses. While each of

these types of vendors o�ers a lot of value in customer acquisition

and user experience, it is still important to take every measure

possible to limit the potential risks by ensuring that they are

performing optimally.

"Time Is Money: The Cost of Downtime." Emerson Network Power. Web.

<http://www.emersonnetworkpower.com/en-US/Solutions/infographics/Pages/graphicoftheweek37.aspx>.

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1

THE PRICE OF POOR

PERFORMANCE

There are two sectors of the costs associated with IT Ops: the cost of

running the department e�ciently, and what your business stands to

lose when performance failures occur. There's a direct link between

the performance of a website and its revenue. The cost of poor

performance spans several di�erent aspects of the business,

including loss of transactions, loss of customer trust, SLA penalties,

and extra resources required to resolve the issue.

According to a study conducted by Visions Solutions , there are two

types of costs associated with downtime and performance issues:

direct and indirect.

The direct cost category includes lost transaction revenue, wages,

and inventory, as well as legal penalties obtained from an SLA

breach. The loss of customer goodwill and business to competitors

are considered indirect costs.

All of these costs add up to actual dollar amounts that easily reach

into the millions.

"Planned or Unplanned, All Downtime Is Bad." Vision Solutions, Inc., 22 Apr. 2014. Web. 13 Jan. 2016.

<http://blog.visionsolutions.com/2014/04/22/planned-or-unplanned-all-downtime-is-bad/>.

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2

THE PRICE OF POOR

PERFORMANCE

The Stats :

Web performance doesn't necessarily need to be examined in a

negative light; it can be used to drive more tra�c and ultimately

bring revenue into your business. Optimizing your site can create

astounding increases in conversion rates and overall revenue.

The average yearly amount lost by a company because of

performance issues across North America and Great Britain was

$140,003

One organization reported that they lost a total of $1,855,979 to

downtime in 2013

Walmart grew incremental revenue by up to 1% for every 100ms

of performance improvement

Walmart grew incremental revenue by up to 1% for every 100ms

of improvement

Shopzilla decreased average page load time from 6 seconds to 1.2

seconds, which increased revenue by 12%, and page views by 25%

Amazon increased revenue by 1% for every 100ms of performance

improvement

Yahoo increased tra�c by 9% for every 400ms of improvement

Mozilla got 60 million more Firefox downloads per year by

making their pages 2.2 seconds faster

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The Stats : 4

Avaya. Network Agility Research 2014. February 2014

https://www.avaya.com/usa/documents/network-agility-research-2014-avaya-networking-feb-2014.pdf.

Čandrlić, Goran. How Website Speed A�ects Conversion Rates. December 14, 2012

http://www.globaldots.com/how-website-speed-a�ects-conversion-rates/

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USER EXPECTATIONS User expectations are incredibly high and have been rapidly

increasing as technology advances. Ensuring that your site is able to

at least meet your users' expectations is imperative to maximizing

your bottom line. As mentioned earlier, the indirect costs of poor

performance can be detrimental to your business, and it only takes

one bad user experience for your business to su�er the

consequences.

The Stats : 5

47% of users expect a webpage to load in 2 seconds or less

64% of shoppers who are dissatisfied with their site visit will go

to a competitor's site for their next shopping experience

88% of online consumers are less likely to return to a site after a

bad experience

Almost 50% of users expressed a less positive perception of the

company overall after a single bad experience

More than one-third of users say would tell others about their

disappointing experience

Moth, David. Site speed: case studies, tips and tools for improving your conversion rate. October 23, 2012

https://econsultancy.com/blog/10936-site-speed-case-studies-tips-and-tools-for-improving-your-conversi

on-rate

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Key benefits of passive monitoring include:

Monitoring of requests that may be cached by the user agent or

a proxy

Monitoring of client-side events and activities

Application spanning

Monitoring of page-to-page latency as seen by the user

Monitoring actual page render time

ACTIVE VS. PASSIVE

MONITORING

Active monitoring solutions continuously test from specific locations

with user simulations to provide synthetic metrics and alerts based

on the performance of the site. In these instances, the monitor is

emulating a browser to mimic actions that an actual user would

perform, and collects the data based on the site's performance

during that time.

While active monitoring solutions are beneficial in early discovery, it's

also a good idea to deploy a passive monitoring solution, or Real

User Measurement (RUM), to examine the true behavior of your

users.

CATCHPOINT CAN SAVE YOU TIME AND MONEY

CATCHPOINT

SYNTHETIC

Catchpoint Synthetic is an intuitive tool that collects the right data in

order for you to e�ciently and accurately monitor the performance

of your website and applications. Our infrastructure is built with the

largest global node coverage in the industry, including over 310

Backbone nodes in 62 countries, all of which are located in Tier 1 ISPs

and datacenters. We o�er testing monitors that expand beyond web,

like mobile, HTML code, transaction, API, DNS, TCP, and more.

Once the data is collected, you can choose from a variety of charting

options to dissect and analyze according to the metrics that mean

the most to your business.

Catchpoint Synthetic o�ers clear, comprehensive visibility into your

performance so that you can troubleshoot more e�ciently and

deliver exceptional user experiences.

CATCHPOINT

ONPREM AGENT

Location matters when it comes to evaluating internet connectivity

and user experience. Catchpoint OnPrem delivers dedicated agents

to monitor websites, applications, and protocols from locations that

are critical for customer and employee success. Catchpoint

customers can deploy physical or virtual machines running an

OnPrem agent in their datacenter, branch o�ces, brick-and-mortar

stores, or call centers. With over 15 monitor types, including browser,

streaming, API, FTP, and traceroute testing, OnPrem agents provide a

clear, in-depth view of availability and performance, as well as the

individual impact of each part of your infrastructure.

CATCHPOINT

GLIMPSE

As Catchpoint’s Real User Measurement (RUM) tool, Glimpse delivers

a clear view of actual user experience data so you can accurately

assess how your performance – including that of your DNS – is

a�ecting your business’s bottom line.

Glimpse o�ers a variety of powerful features, including the Data

Explorer. This allows you to examine a finite time period and analyze

data on a more granular level. Data Explorer can perform

multi-dimensional analyses on raw data using 20 di�erent data

attributes and three dimensions. In addition to averages, several

statistical values are available within this feature, like standard

deviation, 75th percentile, 95th percentile, and more.

You also have the ability to investigate the correlations between page

speed and key business indicators using the Engagement Reporting

feature.

Glimpse takes RUM further by collecting actual user experience data

and combining it with an innovative analytics engine to make

performance-based business decisions easier than ever.

TROUBLESHOOTING Troubleshooting time can be a significant cost if it isn’t executed

e�ciently. It’s critical to use a digital performance analytics tool that

operates in an environment that allows you to minimize the external

noise that can influence the data that’s collected and increase mean

time-to-resolution.

"Since using Catchpoint, performance has improved by an

average of 3-4 seconds per page by identifying problematic

third-party calls and daily trends. Performance is a big part of

the bottom line. Depending on the stats you believe, a

1-second slowdown can equal a 7% conversion loss.

-Jess Turner Senior Performance Analyst, OnlineStores, Inc.

Catchpoint Synthetic is built on an infrastructure with the industry’s

largest global node coverage including over 350 Backbone nodes,

which are all located in Tier 1 ISPs and datacenters, to provide the

most accurate data. There are more testing monitors available that

allow you to examine criteria other than web like mobile, HTML code,

transaction, API, DNS, TCP, and more.

When a performance issue occurs, it’s imperative that you conduct

an in-depth analysis of the incident to truly understand the cause and

prevent a similar issue from reoccurring.

"We have had certain third party sites taking a longer time to

respond and causing an overall increase in the page load time.

Catchpoint gives us the ability to set up tests quickly and

capture data on failures. This has made the jobs of Inuit’s

Marketing Operations team easier and more effective.

-Chandrasekar Sankaranarayanan SBG-Marketing OPS Tech Lead, Intuit

Catchpoint Synthetic o�ers a broad scope of analysis options. You

can compare side-by-side trends in historical time intervals to get a

real-time understanding of pattern changes and event correlations.

Other analysis features include advanced statistical options,

extensible data, and precise charting.

ANALYZING

The first step in optimization is to get a clear understanding of your

site’s current performance. Catchpoint Glimpse collects valuable RUM

data in real-time, giving you complete visibility into your performance

at any given moment. This allows you to get the real user insight you

need to make improvements to your site and enhance the customer

experience.

“Catchpoint, originally purchased as our main alerting

platform, has become our trusted go-to-strategic partner for

continuous web performance monitoring, analysis and

optimization. Not only can we more quickly identify and

resolve problems, but Catchpoint’s analytics have also helped

us uncover many new opportunities for system and business

improvement. With Catchpoint, we can do significantly more

monitoring for the same cost. We have already realized major

improvements in web performance that we believe directly

impact customer satisfaction.”

-Michael Diliberto CIO, priceline.com

Ensuring better user experiences also relies on having information

when you need it. The Catchpoint Custom Dashboard is a

customizable window in which you can view the most up-to-date test

and performance information without having to refresh or navigate

to a new page.

OPTIMIZING

Widgets are defined in performance charts and can be used on one

or more dashboards. You can create more than one dashboard and

customize each to your teams’ exact needs. This allows you to catch

performance problems earlier, which will help to decrease MTTR, and,

most importantly, fix the issue before your users are impacted.

Catchpoint Synthetic and Glimpse are digital performance analytics

tools that can help improve your performance without eating away at

the little amount of time your IT team has to spare—considering

every second in IT has a massive dollar sign attached to it, it’s one

cost your business can’t a�ord to cut.

OPTIMIZING

ABOUT CATCHPOINT Catchpoint is a leading Digital Performance Analytics company that

provides unparalleled insight into your customer-critical services to

help you consistently deliver an amazing customer experience.

Designed for digital business, Catchpoint is the only end-user

experience monitoring (EUM) platform that can simultaneously

capture, index and analyze object level performance data inline

across the most extensive monitor types and node coverage,

enabling a smarter, faster way to preempt issues and optimize service

delivery.

More than 350 customers in over 30 countries trust Catchpoint to

strengthen their brand and grow their business. To request a free trial,

visit www.catchpoint.com/freetrial.

"This proved the easiest business case that I have ever made

to the executive team. Catchpoint paid for itself before we

even finished our [proof of concept]. That simple POC

environment was a game changer for us."

Paul Fries Honeywell Monitoring Leader

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