ExtraHop helps GTA enhance travel services

GTA, a leading distributor of travel products and services, is using ExtraHop to help enhance the speed and reliability of applications resulting in a superior user experience.

GTA delivers amazing travel experiences to millions of global customers through its portfolio of accommodations, tours, excursions, attractions, and more from over 50,000 suppliers in 185 countries. On the backend, GTA relies on complex internal systems to process over a billion searches and tens of thousands of bookings every day to sell millions of rooms a night in more than 25 languages online and throughout the world.

As an intermediary between travel industry suppliers and their clients, GTA prides itself on its ability to offer both flexibility and reliability. As Mark Geldart, Platforms and Operations Manager for GTA, explains, “When you are handling tens of millions of searches each hour and thousands of bookings, even a minor outage or dip in performance can have a major impact on the business.”

GTA’s IT department consists of multiple teams responsible for different areas including network, application development, and security. Even with a global footprint spanning 86 offices across 38 strategic locations, GTA has a largely centralised IT infrastructure. As such, the business must maintain high visibility into its application and service delivery environment, which must be available 24 hours a day. If there are problems, the IT department needs to be able to move quickly before service is disrupted – not an easy proposition when your application stack consists of a complex mix of custom-built and off-the-shelf applications running across physical and virtualized servers.

For GTA, visibility into one application or one part of the infrastructure isn’t enough. The interconnected nature of its systems and the scale at which it processes transactions means GTA’s IT teams need to understand not just individual application performance but the impact of different applications and infrastructure components across all systems.

“ExtraHop allows us to drill down into an application or HTTP transaction and pull out detailed information that would normally require multiple tools – or in some cases, would be almost impossible to gather quickly,” explains Thomas Bowles, Monitoring and Reporting Analyst for GTA.

ExtraHop provides complete visibility into everything from database to cloud traffic by securely decoding over 50 enterprise protocols, including SSL/TLS-encrypted sessions, at line rate (100 Gbps). Using real-time stream processing, ExtraHop transforms network data in flight into structured wire data while machine learning and guided investigations help GTA detect and respond to hidden problems and opportunities with zero impact to performance.

For the past seven years, GTA has used ExtraHop on a daily basis to deliver immense value in helping to improve capacity planning, reporting, and security as well as allowing its developers to accelerate release cycles for new products and services.

“Almost every day, ExtraHop delivers incredibly valuable insights that allow us to fix problems, improve user experience, and understand our networks and applications to help us make better long-term strategic decisions,” says Geldart. “ExtraHop also powers several dashboards that we use for service reporting that provide a real-time view of all of our applications and services that are not only useful to IT teams, but which are also appreciated by senior management across the business.”