February 23, 2022
By Instana, an IBM Company | 4 minute read
With an audience of more than 236 million unique browsers across 24 countries, PROMOTORA DE INFORMACIONES, S.A. (PRISA) is one of the Spanish-speaking world’s leading media companies. Its brands include El Pais, Santillana and El Huffpost.
Producing and distributing high-quality news, entertainment and educational content to international viewers and readers means managing hundreds of different information systems — and optimizing them to support the best audience experience.
For PRISA, performance is key. Application problems can have immediate and detrimental impact on consumers’ perception of the brand. “A one-second time difference in displaying content makes a huge difference to our audience’s experience,” says Jorge Tome Hernando, PRISA Tecnologia’s Director of IT Architecture, Operations, Security and Workplace.
PRISA has adopted cloud-native technologies for scalability and agility, but the company still had a number of systems built over legacy technologies. “Managing performance in such complex environments is really difficult,” says Hernando. “There are a lot of different pieces and dependencies. When we have a performance problem, trying to find the root cause is difficult and very time consuming.”
Despite having several monitoring solutions in place, PRISA lacked the end-to-end visibility into applications, infrastructure and underlying services that it needed to ensure application performance. “We had insight into how our infrastructure was running,” Hernando explains. “But we did not have vision into the processes of the overlapping technologies. Connecting the points and understanding the relationships was the difficult part.”
Instana provides a complete vision of how our services are running, helping us achieve our goals of performance, reliability and cost optimization.
Jorge Tome Hernando
Director of IT Architecture, Operations, Security and Workplace, PRISA Tecnologia
New solution,new possibilities
Working with technology partner Hopla! Software, PRISA implemented the IBM® Observability by Instana® solution and quickly gained the end-to-end visibility that the company needed.
With Instana’s straightforward, single-agent deployment, PRISA gained immediate results. “The deployment is easy, very easy,” says Hernando. “The cost is reasonable and indexed to the volume of the infrastructure, NOT to the volume of the traffic we manage, which was really important to us managing such high volumes of traffic.”
PRISA appreciated Instana’s automatic and continuous discovery to combat the complexity of the company’s cloud-native stack and all of its moving pieces.
Hernando explains: “Our infrastructure is very liquid; servers and services appear and disappear dynamically based on demand. Instana automatically visualizes our applications and infrastructure in real time, helping us discover business dependencies that we didn’t know existed.”
In the end, it was an easy decision to select Instana based on three key factors: cost, ease of deployment and the evolving pace of the platform.
Proactive resolutions, optimized performance
Engineering time, especially when keeping services performing, is very costly for organizations. Even more so for publishers, whose page load times are a critical metric for consumer experiences and revenue streams.
With Instana, PRISA can resolve application issues before they impact customers. Keeping systems operating efficiently is no longer an issue, allowing the company to free up engineering resources that can be used to innovate, evolve and improve services to better compete in the marketplace.
“Instana provides a complete vision of how our services are running, helping us achieve our goals of performance, reliability and cost optimization,” says Hernando.
About Instana, an IBM Company
Instana, an IBM Company, provides an Enterprise Observability Platform with automated application performance monitoring capabilities to businesses operating complex, modern, cloud-native applications no matter where they reside — on premises or in public and private clouds, including mobile devices or IBM Z® mainframe computers.
Control modern hybrid applications with Instana’s AI-powered discovery of deep contextual dependencies inside hybrid applications. Instana also provides visibility into development pipelines to help enable closed-loop DevOps automation.
These capabilities provide actionable feedback needed for clients as they optimize application performance, enable innovation and mitigate risk, helping DevOps increase efficiency and add value to software delivery pipelines while meeting their service and business level objectives.