DigitalOcean Customer Story Video Transcript
My name is Luca Salvatore. I'm the network engineering manager at DigitalOcean.
DigitalOcean has become the second biggest hosting provider in the world.
We have 11 data centers worldwide and we contribute a significant amount of traffic to the Internet.
Networks are getting faster, they're getting cheaper, and in many cases, they are getting more complicated.
The network is the most important thing at DigitalOcean, it's critical to our business.
Everything runs on the network, so if the network is not performing to its specifications, then everything has a problem.
Before we had ThousandEyes, we really had very little to no visibility from outside our network.
Because we're a cloud company and we live on the Internet, we need to know what's going on, on the Internet.
Before we had ThousandEyes, the best we could do was run some pings and traceroutes from locations outside of our network, which is not great when you're troubleshooting an issue.
When we brought ThousandEyes in, it really opened up the door for our support team especially to get some really, really good information when a problem occurs.
If there's an outage and ThousandEyes picks that up really quickly, it's actually really easy to see that there's a problem.
For our support team, that's excellent information to have because they can then go back to the customer and say, "Yes, we see an outage with a provider. Our network engineers are working on it and they'll have it fixed pretty soon."
A problem that may have taken between 20 and 30 minutes to troubleshoot originally now takes as long as it takes to log into the ThousandEyes portal and figure it out.
That could be five minutes.
We use ThousandEyes to monitor all of our 11 locations, so we use lots of the Cloud Agents that ThousandEyes provides and we point them at a specific VM inside our data center.
That gives us statistics on latency and packet loss, which are two very important things for our customers and for us.
My favorite part of the ThousandEyes platform is definitely the path visualization.
This allows us to see every single Cloud Agent and what its path is like to the endpoint that it's monitoring within our data center.
When there's a problem, it's very, very easy to see exactly where the problem is, what provider it's occurring on, and it means we can quickly fix the problem.
My other favorite part of ThousandEyes is the reporting that it gives us. It allows us to get some really, really high- and low-level reports.
These are especially good for our executive team who want to see the availability of a data center or how latency is tracking from a specific location to one of our data centers.
The most positive impact that ThousandEyes has given DigitalOcean is definitely the insight that the support team now has when talking to customers.
They can see really quickly that if a customer has a problem along the path between their home and our data center, they can easily see exactly where that problem is.
ThousandEyes frees up network engineers to do network engineering, instead of troubleshooting.
The more visibility you have into your network and from outside your network, the better you are at your job, which just, in turn, creates a better customer experience.
ThousandEyes really gives us the visibility that we need to effectively tackle the tickets and give great customer service.
