When Catchpoint came to CloudShark, we saw it as a perfect opportunity to demonstrate just how useful CloudShark can be in the brave new world of Cloud applications. Both SaaS and IaaS providers can really benefit from CloudShark’s ability to organize, secure, and share network captures that might come from all over the place.
The Challenge: Managing and Monitoring a Large Scale Cloud Service through Packet Capture
With today’s world of Cloud services like Software or Infrastructure-as-a-Service (SaaS and IaaS), keeping a finger on application performance at all levels has never been more critical. Luckily, companies like Catchpoint are leading the way in infrastructure monitoring.
Catchpoint provides real time analytics in the end to end performance of internet services. Their application monitoring tools allow companies to measure the behavior of their services from multiple vantage points to better understand their performance and the factors impacting it. With over one hundred locations worldwide monitoring Web, DNS, Streaming, APIs and FTP services, Catchpoint often needs to go down to the packet capture level using a TCP capture tool like Wireshark.
“We do about 10-20 captures a day from our different nodes,” said Mehdi Daoudi, CEO and Co-Founder of Catchpoint, “So as you can imagine collecting the pcap files can be challenging. We have hundreds of servers with Wireshark installed.”
With that many captures, doing things the old way just didn’t cut it. “We were using Wireshark, then emailing the pcap files. Some of them were bigger than 50MB - not really conducive to email of course,” said Mehdi.
The Solution: The CloudShark Appliance Capture Management System
“We were looking for a solution that would allow us to automate and reduce the complexity of capturing, storing, and sharing all of those pcap files,” said Mehdi. “That’s where CloudShark came in.”
Through CloudShark’s capture management system, Catchpoint was able to take captures from hundreds of different locations and put them all in one place, and manage access to them by their team and their customers.
“The ability to send captures from our remote Wireshark capture to our CloudShark appliance is key,” said Mehdi. “We can instantly upload captures through the CloudShark API, and then share that data with our customers without sending entire files back and forth.”
“What’s more, the analysis that we’ve done can be seen by the next person without having to retrace our steps,” said Mehdi. “Since it all works in a browser through web links, we don’t need everyone to have Wireshark installed on their computer to look at the data, and can even look at it on an iPad or Mac. The opportunity to really collaborate on network captures for the first time is amazing.”
The Bottom Line - Increased Efficiency and Reduced Complexity Through Packet Surfing
CloudShark’s ability to seamlessly integrate into Catchpoint’s network monitoring infrastructure, and ability to apply advanced web technologies to packet level analysis, saved Catchpoint time, money, and headaches.
“It’s priceless,” said Mehdi. “What used to take 10-30 minutes now takes only seconds to do! CloudShark has taken a big bite out of the tedious process of wire level network analysis!”
