The days of endless lines and in-store mobs on Black Friday are coming to an end. Instead, shoppers are cramming into network pipes and pushing server limits to secure coveted deals online. While brick-and-mortar sales wane, online shopping on Black Friday is growing at a record pace each year. It’s no wonder Ecommerce Web Operations teams are beginning holiday shopping preparations almost immediately after the previous year concludes. In this webinar, we’ll provide valuable lessons that are designed to improve your preparation plan and ensure you’re confident going into the holiday season. This includes: A review of trends from previous seasons to show common causes of outages and how sites have adapted An outline of a 4-month preparation plan which includes testing, monitoring, and on-call strategies Recommendations for analyzing and sharing your results for optimal improvement

1. Every Experience Matters
An Anxious Ops
Guide to Nailing
Black Friday
Sponsored by DevOps.com

2. 2
Speaker
Nithyanand Mehta
VP, Technical Services | Black Friday Monitoring Expert

3. 3
Agenda
• Stats & trends
• What to look out for
• A step-by-step
preparation guide
• Q&A

4. 4
The Rise of Digital
0
1
2
3
4
5
6
7
8
9
Thanksgiving Day Black Friday Cyber Monday
Online Sales (Billions)
Axis Title
2016 2017 2018
$7.9B
largest sales day in
US history

5. 5
The Rise of Digital
Online Sales Top Retailers 3-Day Cyber Week Normal 3 day period
$17.8B
sales in 2018
8%
Of total sales
973%
Higher than avg. *eMarketer Retail Index
**National Retail Federation

6. 6
$97m / hour
$1.6m / min.
*Gremlin

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The Fall of In-Store
+51%
+24%
+22%
+41% -4%
-9%
Online growth
In-Store growth
2015 2016 2017 2018

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Shifting Traffic

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The New Black Friday Chaos

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• $2.4B the Wednesday before Thanksgiving
(31.8% increase)
• Customers experienced glitches and outages
• Major retailers like Walmart, JC Penney, and
Amazon started their Black Friday deals and
discounts on Sunday before Thanksgiving
Pre-Thanksgiving Deals

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• Smartphones & tablets 40% of online sales
($38.8B) 59% of total traffic during holiday
season, a 34% increase.
• Buy Online Pick Up In-Store (BOPIS)
accounted for 32.3% of online sales overall in
2018. Cyber Monday saw a spike in BOPIS of
65%.
Trends to keep an eye on

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Speed Matters!

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• Cloudflare / Verizon BGP Leak
• Google Cloud Platform outage
• Facebook, Instagram, outage
The internet is fragile

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• Lost Sales "Cyberweek" was responsible for
37% of the holiday season's revenue (+4%)
• Public media backlash
• Customer service mayhem
What’s at stake?

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Anxious Ops

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>300%
Traffic Increase
>60%
Conversion
Mobile 65%
Devices
Black Friday & Cyber Monday
Traffic Patterns of 2018
Desktop 35%

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of delivery relies upon third-party vendors.
80%

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0
2,000,000
4,000,000
6,000,000
8,000,000
10,000,000
12,000,000
14,000,000
16,000,000
Google - GTM Adobe DTM Tealium
Tag Management
# of Custiomers Black Friday Traffic 3x
3rd Party Traffic Patterns before & on Black Friday & Cyber
Monday
0
200000
400000
600000
800000
1000000
PayPal Stripe Braintree
Payment Gateway
# of Custiomers Black Friday Traffic 3x
0
50000
100000
150000
200000
250000
300000
350000
Tealeaf IBM Coremetrics
Analytics
# of Custiomers Black Friday Traffic 3x

19. 19
CDN traffic patterns before & on Black Friday & Cyber Monday
0
500000
1000000
1500000
2000000
2500000
3000000
Cloudflare Amazon Cloudfront
Cloudflare & Cloudfront
# of Customers Black Friday Traffic 3x
0
50000
100000
150000
200000
250000
Top CDN Providers
# of Customers Black Friday Traffic 3x

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Common Black Friday Outages

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Reachability
• Peering issues
• Congestion
Availability
• DNS failures
• Connection
Time outs
• SSL failures
• 4xx & 5xx
• Redirect
failures
• Subdomains
availability
issues
• Key 3rd party
going down
• Critical
Transaction
Failures
Performance
• DNS latency
• High TTFB
• Slow SSL
• Origin latency
• Latency @
Edge
• Uncompressed
contents
• Unoptimized
content
• 3rd party
delaying
critical
rendering path
Reliability
• Malfunction
name servers
• CDN Mapping
issues
• Cache Miss
• Undetected
slow end
points or
servers

22. 22
3rd Party Drags

23. 23
3rd Party Drags

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Infrastructure Outages

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Traffic spikes that servers can’t handle (503)

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Introducing Catchpoint’s
Black Friday Assurance Program

27. 27CONFIDENTIAL © Catchpoint 2019
Who we work with

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Monitoring Strategy

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But what and how do you monitor?

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Sample
Ecommerce
Architecture
Detecting Reachability
issues
DNS Failures
DNS Latency
Edge Latency
Edge – Origin Latency
CDN mapping issues
Cache Miss
Redirect Loop
Unoptimized contents
3rd party downtime
3rd party latency creating
bottleneck
1. Origin failures
2. Origin Latency
3. Load Balancing
Issues
4. Application Failures
5. DB latency
6. API latency
7. Critical User
Journey Breakdown

31. 3131
© Catchpoint. Confidential. All rights reserved.
Setup Maintenance
Alerts TriageTrend Analysis
Black Friday Assurance Program

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Here’s how it works
Consultation Implementation /
Deployment
24/7/365
Monitoring &
Maintenance
Pre & Post Event
Analysis
Performance Audit

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Define Goals
& Metrics
Continuous
Improvement
Understand
Components
Measure
Triage
Analyze
Optimize
Implementation
MTTR
Load Times

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Define Goals
& Metrics
Implementation
Understand
Components
Measure
Triage
Analyze
Optimize
Implementation
Load Times

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Test Strategy
This is the first and most important phase
Scripts:
Website updates alter the user flow, breaking the script.
Alerts:
Broken scripts lead to false positives.
Dashboard:
False positives create noise in dashboard data.
Reports:
Data discrepancy leads to reporting errors.
Monitoring Strategy
Displaced

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Team Augmentation
TAP INTO CATCHPOINT’S EXPERTISE
CDN Monitoring
DNS Monitoring
Third-Party SLA Management

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Organizational Challenges
BRIDGE GAPS ACROSS YOUR TEAM
Streamline monitoring efforts across
global teams
Break into new markets
Increase monitoring proficiency &
expertise

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Define Goals
& Metrics
Incident
Response
Understand
Components
Measure
Triage
Analyze
Optimize
Load Times
MTTR

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Incident Management
MAXIMIZE OPERATIONAL EFFICIENCY
Prevent incidents and mitigate impact
through better root cause analysis
Optimize workflow across alerting,
escalation, and remediation

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24/7 NOC Environment
STAY AHEAD OF PERFORMANCE ISSUES
• Track Performance Metrics
• DNS
• Response
• Render Start
• Document Complete
• Availability Tracking
• Diagnostic Issue Isolation
• Alert Triage & Escalation

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Shorten Outages
Playbooks
Proactive Tracking
Diagnostic Issue Isolation &
Escalation

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SLA Management
HOLD YOUR VENDORS ACCOUNTABLE
• Set and Track Thresholds
• Ensure Maximum Payouts from
SLA Breaches
• DNS
• CDN
• Third-Party Applications & Tags

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Define Goals
& Metrics
Optimize
Understand
Components
Measure
Triage
Analyze
Optimize
Load Times

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Data Correlation
FOCUS ON WHAT REALLY MATTERS
Tie performance metrics to
business goals
Understand component impact on
end-user experience

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Optimization Strategies
GET INSIGHTS INTO SPECIFIC IMPROVEMENTS
Synthetic + RUM Correlation
Trend Analysis
KPI Reporting & Tracking

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Optimization Initiatives
CONTINUOUS PERFORMANCE IMPROVEMENT
• Identify Page Elements to
Improve Performance
• Track Performance Trends
• Navigate Challenges of New
Markets
• Correlate Performance to
Business Goals

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Q&A

48. 48
Thank you!