Key benefits
Achieved 99.9% availabilityfor business-critical applications
Cut third-party support costs by 23%
Reduced trouble-shooting activities by 50%
In Latin America, Vrio is a content digital platform that distributes sports, news, music and movies to millions of viewers. With Cisco AppDynamics, it streamlined a complex cloud migration project while achieving 99.9% system availability and reducing costs.
“We have a saying at Vrio: ‘Cisco AppDynamics doesn't make mistakes and doesn't lie.’ This is because it removes any ambiguity when pinpointing the root cause of issues. So, we can work more efficiently as a team to identify and resolve issues."
Thiago Salgado
IT Regional Manager,
Vrio
Challenge
Vrio wanted to launch new channels and programming to grow and retain audience share. To support this goal, it needed to boost IT infrastructure stability, eliminate service interruptions and increase operational efficiency.
Solution
Cisco AppDynamics enables Vrio to monitor all its mission critical applications, quickly identify the root cause of any issues and fix them before they threaten application performance and availability.
Results
Vrio now has a stable, highly available IT infrastructure that is a platform for technology and business innovation in a highly competitive media and entertainment region.
“With Cisco AppDynamics we have created a highly stable, available infrastructure that means we can actively support the company as it launches new platforms and services in the next few years.”
Andre Nazare
Operations Regional Director, Vrio
Challenge
In the 2022 FIFA World Cup, a record number of viewers in Argentina watched the national soccer team win a thrilling final against France on DIRECTV, a Vrio broadband service serving Latin America along with its SKY and DGo streaming services. But as Gonzalo Montiel of Argentina slotted away the winning penalty, Vrio’s Operations Regional Director Andre Nazare and IT Regional Manager Thiago Salgado were glued to another set of screens thousands of miles away in Brazil.
The screens in the Vrio war room weren’t showing a live feed of the games, however. Instead, the operations team was monitoring the performance of applications and systems to deliver uninterrupted, high-definition coverage of matches that also included teams from Ecuador, Brazil and Uruguay.
Top of the league for innovation
Successful coverage of the World Cup was the culmination of a seven-year partnership with Cisco AppDynamics, which transformed how Vrio manages its digital ecosystem and — ultimately — the way subscribers consume sports and entertainment in the Latin America region. “We use Cisco AppDynamics to monitor our mission-critical applications from sales and provisioning to CRM and billing,” says Nazare. “But it also provides us with a stable platform for innovation and the delivery of new customer experiences.”
Vrio first turned to Cisco AppDynamics a few years ago when it replaced most of its in-house applications with technology from specialist vendors. This was a major challenge for the teams responsible for monitoring systems and applications. “It was very complicated,” says Salgado. “We couldn’t measure availability and identify failures, and there a was a lot of finger-pointing between different teams.”
Solution
Salgado calls out Cisco AppDynamics application performance monitoring as the solution that first grabbed Vrio’s attention. “Of all the tools we considered, it was the simplest to configure. We also saw the potential to quickly increase system availability and simplify troubleshooting,” he says. Value for money was another factor in the decision. “Cisco AppDynamics demonstrated one of the best cost-benefit ratios based on our decision criteria.”
Some 300 employees in the Vrio IT operations team now use Cisco AppDynamics to identify queries, calls and elements that potentially threaten the availability of critical systems. “Cisco AppDynamics makes it easy for teams to drill down to those components and identify the root cause of issues affecting performance,” says Salgado.
Since the deployment of application performance monitoring, Vrio added database performance monitoring for 100% visibility into application performance, end user monitoring for customer insights, and server visibility and monitoring to correlate business observability with application performance.
Full steam ahead to the cloud
Cisco AppDynamics played a central role in IT projects reaching important milestones across the Vrio business. Not the least of which was its migration to Oracle Cloud, which required careful project planning and execution. “The cloud completely changes the way that we monitor and deploy agents. Even the way that customers interact with our applications is different because you no longer have control of the physical hardware,” says Salgado. “With Cisco AppDynamics we could monitor, troubleshoot and optimize our cloud-based applications and infrastructure during the migration process and beyond.”
“With Cisco AppDynamics, we have achieved 99.9% availability consistently. for the past few years”
Thiago Salgado
IT Regional Manager,
Vrio
Benefits
Best-in-class availability
With millions of viewers across many countries, system availability is a number one priority for Vrio. A single minute of downtime not only alienates customers but does long-term damage to the brand. “With Cisco AppDynamics, we have achieved 99.9% availability consistently for the past few years,” says Salgado.
AppDynamics also enabled the Vrio team to reduce troubleshooting activities by about 50%. “We have a saying at Vrio: ‘AppDynamics doesn't make mistakes and doesn't lie’,” says Salgado. “This is because it removes any ambiguity when pinpointing the root cause of issues. So, we can work more efficiently as a team to identify and resolve issues.”
Reducing support costs
Since the deployment of Cisco AppDynamics, Vrio reduced the cost of maintenance contracts with third-party suppliers by 23% through the transformation of the maintenance bidding process.
Instead of measuring servers, configuration items and headcounts, suppliers are now asked to deliver services based on stability, availability and even application SLAs. "Cisco AppDynamics is like a piggy bank, saving Vrio money rather than contributing to business costs,” says Salgado. “It's also the best pillow and mattress I ever bought, because I sleep much better these days.”
Helping to grow the business
Above all, with Cisco AppDynamics the Vrio team can be more proactive and make a positive contribution to the business. “When you’re not firefighting, you can work on areas that further improve your IT environment and prepare the company for new initiatives,” Nazare says.
Vrio has already launched a streaming app called SKY+ and is planning to expand its broadband streaming offers. “With Cisco AppDynamics we have created a highly stable, available infrastructure that means we can actively support the company as it launches new platforms and services in the next few years,” Nazare explains.
Salgado gives an example of how Cisco AppDynamics supported the merger of the SKY operations team with its colleagues at DirecTV. “We were the first to deploy a unified environment for consoles, parameters and metrics, and this is helping to set the pace for other organizations in the group,” he says.
Looking to the future with Full-Stack Observability
With the World Cup behind them and having successfully unified the regional operations teams, Nazare and Salgado are looking to the future, especially the deployment of Cisco Full-Stack Observability. Here, they see the potential to use AI and machine learning features to track and diagnose problems automatically and provide customers and employees with flawless digital experiences.
“With the Olympics in 2024 and the next World Cup in 2026, we know that we are in safe hands. Just as Argentina won the trophy in 2022, Cisco AppDynamics gives us the visibility to keep our international audience entertained while winning on the broadcast-media playing field,” says Salgado.
About Vrio
Vrio Corporation, a media company owned by the Werthein Group, provides connectivity solutions as well as news, sports, and entertainment information services in Latin America through its DIRECTV, SKY and DGo platform brands. With the mission of offering and democratizing entertainment to all, it continually invests in offering products and services that are best suited to each region and its content and entertainment consumption needs.
Resources
View all resources
2023 Gartner® Report: Market Guide for Digital Experience Monitoring (DEM)
Digital experience is now a key driver of revenue, retention, and brand reputation. See how Gartner says the role of DEM is changing — and how it evaluates various DEM vendors.
Empower customer digital experience and application dependency monitoring with Cisco Full-Stack Observability
Bi-directional integration of Cisco AppDynamics and Cisco ThousandEyes.
Improving app performance with deep database visibility
Learn how to quickly identify and troubleshoot database-related issues impacting application performance.
MultiChoice’s journey to the cloud with Cisco AppDynamics
AppDynamics enables MultiChoice to proactively manage application performance to deliver rich streaming content to customers with a seamless digital journey.