ExtraHop Chosen Over 25 Vendors to Help Increase Application Speeds by 500 Percent for More Than 700 Gas Stations Sharing a Congested Network
SEATTLE, WA – June 19, 2013 – ExtraHop, the provider of real-time IT operational intelligence from wire data, announced today that it has helped Murphy USA increase application speeds by as much as 500 percent. A wholly owned subsidiary of Murphy Oil operating 1,175 gas stations in 23 U.S. states, Murphy USA also has used ExtraHop to reduce mean time to resolution (MTTR) for network and application troubleshooting by 70 percent.Despite having numerous legacy monitoring tools in place, Murphy USA found that only ExtraHop could provide real-time visibility into application performance. This visibility is required to ensure application performance for more than 700 gas stations sharing a single 10Mbps VSAT link.
"The distributed and bandwidth-constrained nature of the environment means that our Network team is the first to take the call when something goes wrong, whether it is a network or application problem," says Micah Rodgers, Senior Network Security Engineer at Murphy USA. "We're the ones that get the call at 2 a.m. asking, 'Why can't we sell gas?' We are responsible for fielding issues that would normally be assigned to the Application Support group or a DBA and so need visibility into application and system performance—even if we don't have access to those systems."
Murphy USA's Network team sought deep visibility with zero overhead from a new solution. After evaluating more than 25 vendors over three months, Murphy USA chose the ExtraHop platform for its noninvasive deployment, ease of use, and superior analysis capabilities. As Rodgers describes, "ExtraHop provided the application-level detail we sought and did so without agents or synthetic transactions, which would have added unacceptable network overhead."
ExtraHop's unique visibility into wire data enabled Murphy USA to install a single ExtraHop appliance in its primary data center and answer previously intractable questions. Unlike network monitoring tools, the ExtraHop platform performs full-stream reassembly and full-content analysis of wire data to extract performance metrics and business intelligence from all tiers in real time at speeds up to a sustained 20Gbps.
"ExtraHop shows what the applications are actually saying, not just who is talking to whom," explains Rodgers. "This application-level insight provides a basis for our IT organization to collaborate. Our DBAs use ExtraHop to tune queries and eliminate redundant queries, for example. And many groups refer to ExtraHop first before contacting the Network team."
"Murphy USA's situation is a classic example of how application fluency and transaction-level visibility can empower IT Operations teams," says Jesse Rothstein, CEO, ExtraHop. "Murphy USA needed an operational intelligence platform to help troubleshoot performance issues for a wide variety of applications, while doing it all in real time with no resource overhead and without running afoul of PCI regulations by storing packets. We are proud to have been selected by the Murphy USA IT Operations team as the only platform capable of meeting all their requirements."