edo Interactives
Founded in 2007, edo Interactive develops technologies that use payment card platforms for digital marketing purposes, such as the placement of coupons on debit, credit or prepaid cards. The company provides merchants the edo Marketing Platform, where incentive balances are loaded onto consumers’ payment cards. Balances can be redeemed at checkout, driving targeted consumers to purchase products.
Problem
edo Interactive has always been committed to providing innovative digital incentive solutions to help advertisers connect with consumers. When the company launched in 2007, VP of Engineering Eric Reuthe quickly realized they needed a monitoring solution in place to ensure the availability of their Website and applications. Without any kind of performance monitoring, the only way edo Interactive knew if their clients were experiencing issues on their site was if a customer reported it.
According to Jay Graves, CTO of edo Interactive, “There is nothing worse than getting a call from a client saying your website is down. That’s the worst feeling in the world.”
The company wanted a solution that could provide insight into site performance from their customers’ perspective and deliver real-time reports about uptime, availability, and other metrics. As a growing start-up, edo Interactive was doing a lot of configuration changes and regular system updates. They needed a way to rapidly identify, solve, and prevent Web issues.
Having a reliable website was the final piece needed for edo Interactive to ensure a good customer experience.
Solution
In May 2008, edo Interactive began using AlertSite® DéjàClickTM from SmartBear, an inside-the-browser Web performance monitoring system, to monitor all of their customer-facing sites so they would know first if any issues arose. In addition to the corporate and internal websites, edo Interactive also set up external monitoring of third party partners and APIs that are hosted by the company. If a partner site goes down, or if an individual component on a partner site slows down, it will have a ripple effect on edo’s sites. Being able to identify and remediate issues on partner sites, as well as its own, is crucial to edo’s success, and something it was unable to accomplish in the past.
“As an IT team, we’re held accountable for the uptime of our system,” said Graves. ”Knowing that it is being watched by Alertsite helps us maintain that accountability.”
edo Interactive currently monitors from three of the AlertSite monitoring stations where its customers are concentrated: Washington, D.C.; Chicago; and Los Angeles. The monitors track performance of pages, links, embedded components, embedded objects, and even cursor movements of users on the sites.
“AlertSite is very easy to use and extremely reliable,” said Graves. “I was blown away by the features, many of which are not available with the other products on the market.”
In addition to the performance monitoring, edo Interactive is also using the AlertSite Security Vulnerability ScanTM to examine all Internet-connected devices, ports, routers, and firewalls for overlooked vulnerabilities or system weaknesses that hackers could exploit. The ability to identify real-time security risks gives edo Interactive the peace of mind that comes from knowing their most important online asset, their website, is protected.
“AlertSite monitoring is the only reason we were able to prevent a major performance issue during the launch of our new Facebook application.”
— Jay Graves,, CTO of edo Interactive
Success
As the saying goes, "you cannot improve what you cannot measure." By taking a proactive approach to performance monitoring, edo Interactive has been able to ensure customers get better than 99.7 percent uptime during development and the fastest possible performance on its site as well as sites through its partner ecosystem. “Our goal is four-nines (99.99%) for a marketing application,” said Reuthe. “And this is how we get there.”
Research shows that customers are won or lost on the Internet in just seconds. AlertSite monitoring has helped edo Interactive avoid outages and slow downs that cause end user abandonment. Knowing the true end user experience helps edo perform at a level that keeps customers satisfied.
More importantly, with AlertSite monitoring in place, the company was able to avoid the potential damaging repercussions of a faulty Facebook application and protect their investment and new product launch. The problem, which was discovered and corrected before launch, would not have been discovered otherwise, and could have crippled the app for hundreds, if not thousands, of customers. The hourly transaction monitoring and AlertSite’s real-time alerts of errors notified edo Interactive’s management to a problem in the backend of the application, and allowed them to make the proper adjustments ahead of time.
By measuring the end user experience, edo Interactive can detect issues proactively, instead of waiting for an e-mail or phone call from a customer or client.
“As an IT team, we’re held accountable for the uptime of our system,” said Graves. “Knowing that it is being watched by AlertSite helps us maintain that accountability.”