Case Studies

DoubleClick Employs Visualware's Profile Technology to Pinpoint Internet Service Delivery Problems

When Internet connectivity problems arise with customers, software tools that diagnose the problem immediately become invaluable. At online marketing giant DoubleClick (NYSE: DLCK), VP of Quality of Service Mehdi Daoudi has found his silver bullet, capable of pinpointing performance problems in mere minutes - not hours or days - regardless of whether the problem lies with the customer, the network, the application, the firewall or the server.

Headquartered in New York City with 37 offices worldwide, DoubleClick provides products and services that enable direct marketers, publishers, advertisers and agencies to market to Internet consumers. DoubleClick serves over 2 billion Internet ads a day for over 3,000 customers worldwide. Clients like Terra Lycos, Bertelsmann, About.com, eBay and The Wall Street Journal Online depend on DoubleClick's ability to provide media delivery services with uncompromised availability.

The Problem

When customers complained of slow response times or unavailability of service, there was no good way to determine where the problem was. With Internet service delivery, the problem may be on the local network/ISP, may be along the Internet route between the customer and DoubleClick center or it could be a problem with Doubleclick's network or application providing the service. This uncertainty made problem identification a costly endeavor, as often DoubleClick technicians would travel to the customer site at very remote locations to run tests and diagnose the problem. In some cases, the problem may have resolved itself by the time the technician arrived. In others, the problem was due to customer's network or ISP and out of the control of DoubleClick. The high costs associated with travel to support on-site customer visits resulted in stretched resources and many delayed in-house projects. More importantly, if service delivery was below acceptable levels for extended periods, it resulted in unhappy customers.

To provide DoubleClick with the proactive visibility into the real customer service experience, Daoudi began a search for tools to automate the process of measuring and testing connectivity directly from the customer's desktop. The only way to eliminate the problem was to be proactive about identifying a connectivity issue before the customer became aware of it.

Visibility from the customer location was paramount to solving "last mile" connectivity issues and Internet routing problems between the customer and DoubleClick. Automating the gathering of these diagnostics would provide the customer and DoubleClick with the necessary information to help resolve problems rapidly. In many cases, DoubleClick would be able to submit detailed trouble reports directly to an ISP to resolve Internet routing problems normally considered outside the control of both customer and supplier. To be acceptable to DoubleClick customers, Daoudi knew that any solution would have to be unobtrusive, secure, simple to deploy, centrally configured and require no customer configuration or administration rights.

The Solution

In April 2002, Daoudi and his QoS team deployed DesktopProfile at the company's data centers in Dublin, Sydney and Thornton, Colorado. After comparing DesktopProfile to more-costly performance monitoring solutions offered by other vendors, Daoudi was impressed by the DesktopProfile feature, which places a thin (about 50k) non-intrusive agent on a customer's remote desktop. The agent requires no installation, configuration or management by the customer.

Early on the in the DesktopProfile testing process, Daoudi ran into a "showstopper" with the product, as at that point it was not designed to collect the connectivity information from behind firewalls. In response, Visualware engineers brainstormed on how to resolve the issue and soon delivered a version that collected the data in environments with firewalls. "I was amazed at the speed that Visualware worked to resolve the issue and deliver a working solution," said Daoudi. "The DesktopProfile product is just the solution we were looking for."

With the DesktopProfile agents in place, connectivity information is seamlessly collected and reported from customer locations around the world directly to DoubleClick's primary data center in New York. This implementation provides the visibility to the actual customer Internet connectivity and service levels in real-time and historically enabling a problem to be spotted before it affects the customer. DesktopProfile's automated alerting features generate alarms when threshold levels are exceeded, thus enabling a quick response and resolution. This dramatically improves the customer experience and frees engineers to focus on enhancing the service and not fighting fires.

Today, DoubleClick's QoS team has deployed the DesktopProfile remote agents to several of its major customers and data centers in locations that include Australia, Brazil, China, Ireland and Scandinavia. All data collected is reported back to the central management application in the New York data center. Installation at the company's remaining top customers is expected to be complete by mid-July.

"All of the customers where we have deployed DesktopProfile have responded very positively," added Daoudi. "The proactive means we now have for spotting problems and thus moving quickly to resolve them really means a lot to our customers. For instances where the problem is at the customer location or an ISP, it has resulted in great savings to the customers as well, because it reduces the time.