ExtraHop helps Basefarm gain a deeper understanding of infrastructure

ExtraHop says that Basefarm, a leading hosting provider serving clients across Norway, Sweden and Holland has gained unprecedented visibility into its critical infrastructure. With ExtraHop, Basefarm is able to better understand how the relationships between its network, front-end and back-end applications can lead to latency and more importantly it has helped to proactively solve issues before impact service delivery.

Basefarm is widely recognised within the regions it serves as an expert in management of mission critical business applications. From 7 data centres spread between Norway, Sweden and the Netherlands, the 350 staff at Basefarm manage up to 10,000 physical and virtual servers and cloud solutions delivering critical applications for the smallest businesses all the way up to critical enterprise solutions on behalf of governmental departments and major public sector projects.
As a highly technical organisation, Basefarm has developed a number of its own management and troubleshooting tools and as Sverre Stokken, a network manager for Basefarm explains, the company believes in a proactive instead of reactive approach to service delivery. “We are constantly examining the systems we look after trying to spot potential issues based on performance and latency trends but these are often very complex systems. Trying to understand whether a latency issue is the result of an application, network or storage layer or maybe even other dependencies such as a database is challenging. What we felt we needed was a system that could give us an end-to-end view across the entire infrastructure.”

However, installing agents on servers under management was deemed as too invasive in some instances which prompted an examination of wire data alternatives. “ExtraHop seemed like a perfect solution to our problem, and it also enabled us to initially install it in a limited part of the network without a major roll-out which would allow us to quickly test its effectiveness,” Stokken adds.

In April of 2014, the IT manager started a two week project to test capabilities of ExtraHop on part of the production network. “There are a number of ways that you can monitor the network and applications, but what became clear with ExtraHop is that it allowed us to gain a much deeper insight with hardly any effort – it effectively removed a lot of the time consuming complexity and gave us actionable information on demand.”

Stokken and his team specified, installed and run the ExtraHop solution without external training and he adds, “…It has allowed us to answer some detailed questions about where performance bottlenecks may have originated, which in some cases, was actually in the application layer and not necessarily the network. The capability has been extremely useful and from our small scale trial it is clear that ExtraHop has potential for a wider scale role out within Basefarm.”

“Basefarm is a great environment to highlight the potential of operational intelligence using wire data analyses techniques,” explains Owen Cole, VP of EMEA at ExtraHop. “The density of the IT within their infrastructure and the critical nature of many of the application sets means that log and agent-based APM and NPM technologies can never match that ability of ExtraHop to expose and then correlate the underlying relationships and flows that underpin the critical application delivery processes – before potential issues escalate,” he concludes.