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Protecting The Rights of Injured People Throughout the Southeast
A leading law firm in the Southeastern United States, with 15 locations and more than 200 employees is dedicated to protecting the rights of injured people throughout the region. The firm also specializes in disability, social security and veteran administration issues.
The firm is heavily dependent on online connectivity for its day-to-day services. Ensuring that customer conversations proceed smoothly is essential to the firm’s business success. The CIO states, “Our job is to make sure our clients can handle their data properly. We’re taking calls from customers in our offices and from remote locations—so good connectivity is not just a nicety; it’s a key requirement. It is vital to be able to service our clients, accept new clients and provide great customer service across all client cases. You have to be able to communicate with someone to retain them as a customer.”
Keeping ISPs Honest and SLA Compliant Ensures a Consistent Customer Experience
The firm’s IT team adopted ThousandEyes to increase visibility across its online infrastructure. “We treat connectivity like its power. We had experienced systemic issues with our ISP providers, and we wanted to use ThousandEyes to level the playing field,” says the firm’s IT leader.
At one point, the IT team used ThousandEyes to solve a critical ISP issue. “We had an enterprise business- critical fiber service issue with a major ISP we use. We experienced incremental performance issues that were impacting our core services. Through ThousandEyes, we quickly determined that it boiled down to their circuit. If you want to measure outbound circuits, it’s not a trivial task to just nail outbound and inbound circuits on an SD-WAN. We immediately contacted the ISP’s support team.”
The firm’s CIO recalls how ThousandEyes’ screen capture of ISP visualization made the conversation with the ISP provider productive. “Their immediate response was that they pinged Yahoo to check our connection and said, ‘it looks good.’”
Using the ThousandEyes platform, the IT team shared a three-day snapshot, which included five-minute increments of their connectivity issues.
“They tried to say ‘it’s your connection coming out of Atlanta.’”
The team then spun up ThousandEyes agents in Columbia, Virginia, and Corpus Christi. Using this data, the team was able to show it was a BGP issue on Yahoo’s side, and shared proof that the ISP was not providing the promised SLA. Not long after this conversation, the circuit issue cleared up.
“ThousandEyes allowed us to easily arrive at a solution through using empirical evidence. The data snapshots give you real, active data, which gives you the authority to hammer things through with external providers,” states the firm’s IT leader.
Before using ThousandEyes, “Reactionary is the primary adjective I would use to describe our previous situation. Unlike today, we didn’t have the constant ‘always on’ monitoring and data collection that would allow us to go back in time and determine what and when events happened. It could be that the power was out, or it could be that a circuit was down, or due to infrastructure routing and so on. It was all reactionary.”
He expands on how the stop-start nature of dealing with outages impacted the team’s core activities. “Whenever you had an issue, you had to start from ground zero every time. You would check the router, then restart. And you would have to collect all that information. After that, if it was ISP related, then you start running packet capture. We are a small business, and we don’t have time for that. Our responses were limited. In many ways, our approach was based in trusting the ISPs to do what they said they’d do.”
Figure 1: Path visualization from ThousandEyes provides valuable insight into connectivity issues and network outages.
Key Use Cases: Test and Forget, Sharing Insight at Scale
There are multiple areas of the ThousandEyes platform that have made life easier for the IT team at the law firm. “I really like the screenshot with caption because it gives the reviewer flexibility to drill into metrics and even sort by the type of data they are interested in. I can say to an external party, here’s the data, a snapshot of three days worth of data—it stays there forever and tells me who used it. Whenever I create a snapshot, I can see if they’re reviewing it. Accountability is super important in this area...it gets past the ‘who knows what’ part of the support call. My team can immediately get into the problem-solving part.”
The team also appreciates the platform’s ability to proactively raise alerts if a pre-set threshold has been reached, “It’s great that it’s autonomous. I don’t need to look at it every day. It’s always working and this leads to zero admin on my team’s part. Maintenance and availability is critical, and it’s there when I need it.”
The platform’s global scale has also been reassuring. The CIO states, “I really like the availability of global agent selection. I can readily attach and detach stats. Whenever I need to see something, I just do it.” Access to ThousandEyes’ global cloud-based agents was also a benefit. “Since we started using them, we deleted our on-premise agents. I can pull up an agent in the Google Data Center down the street. The flexibility is wonderful. The ability to plan usage and costs with the calculator is also very helpful.”
Managing Through the COVID-19 Pandemic and Moving Toward a Hybrid Future
The COVID-19 pandemic introduced new challenges to the law firm, with a shift to an entirely remote working model. “We went from 250 people sitting in an office, watching monitors on the wall to an entirely remote setup. Our call centers were on-premise, and we had to go full remote within four days. It was a Herculean effort.”
The shift to reliance on home consumer networks, which typically have less bandwidth than office networks, caused severe operational challenges. The CIO explains, ”We went from an on-premise environment with pristine infrastructure to someone at home using their own WiFi... and our employees also had kids home from schools playing video games like Minecraft and Fortnight.” The employees experienced constant connectivity issues as a result. “For good quality, telephony needs low latency, so it’s important to be able to identify connectivity issues.”
Two years later, the firm’s IT team is preparing for their eventual return to the office under a hybrid work model. Even when the COVID-19 pandemic ends, he believes a flexible approach will be the norm, noting, “We’ll be set up so we can rotate things in and out.” He expects to see a generalized percentage of employees work-from-home and a smaller percentage of workers in the office.
Using the Internet Strategically
Ultimately, the firm’s CIO appreciates how ThousandEyes allowed his team to confidently navigate becoming more Internet-dependent as a business. “I have no control over the Internet, but at least I know where to focus my attention,” he says. “Because of ThousandEyes, we are now able to ensure SLAs are respected, we are able to identify the sources of connectivity issues and hold our providers accountable.”
He concludes, “ThousandEyes allows me to solve problems faster. Knowing where not to look is important and helps us quickly identify the true source of the problem. Knowing when something is getting beyond our direct scope to find and fix it ourselves is vital. This knowledge leads to better conversations and faster resolution with our third-party providers. My level of control over the Internet in that regard is tremendous.”
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