Cegedim, an innovative technology and services company providing digital data flow management for healthcare ecosystems, is using the ExtraHop platform to perform complex troubleshooting and ensure the delivery of mission-critical services.
Cegedim employs more than 4,000 people in 11 countries and generated revenue of ˆ441 million in 2016 through its various services, which include more than 120,000 companies connected to its e-invoicing platform and over 320,000 healthcare professionals equipped via its healthcare software. In France, its hospital web portal for information and data exchanges between healthcare institutions is now present in more than 1,200 major healthcare institutions – 26 of which are university hospitals – with more than 2.5 million hospital orders transmitted per year.
To deliver these mission-critical apps and workflows, Cegedim has a mix of in-house developed solutions along with industry standard applications deployed from multiple datacentres across Europe. With complex application relationships and data flows between systems, customers and third parties, Cegedim has made a long-term commitment to invest in performance management skills and tools to help ensure the highest levels of service.
“One of the challenges we’ve faced with traditional performance monitoring tools is that they only look at a narrow slice of our infrastructure, leaving us with no visibility into how performance impacts our end-user experience,” explains Romain Vergniol, Chief Information Security Officer for Cegedim Group. “We had tested a number of solutions but none of them offered us deep visibility without compromising on performance until we evaluated ExtraHop.”
Working with local ExtraHop partner Allentis, formerly known as iD1 it-Solutions, Cegedim deployed ExtraHop at its datacentre near Paris in order to provide real-time IT analytics monitoring tens of thousands of transactions each second. “During our initial proof of concept phase, the first reports we generated uncovered several potential performance issues that stemmed from complex interactions that we had been unable to uncover using any of our other systems,” explains Vergniol. “During the last few months, ExtraHop has been instrumental in helping us to pin down the root cause of several issues that normally require a huge amount of resource and back and forth between network and development teams.”
Vergniol notes that the ExtraHop platform’s remit as a network team requirement has spread to become a valuable asset for development, system, database, dev-ops and even security teams. The solution also helps Cegedim to meet its Service Level Agreements (SLAs) and provide enhanced visibility for its clients.
“Following the successful deployment of ExtraHop, we are now in the process of building its reporting capability directly into a number of our portal applications. In this way, our customers have access to historical reports and real-time metrics on key transactional and performance benchmarks,” explains Vergniol. “This is another capability that has extended the value of ExtraHop beyond performance management to offer a major benefit across the whole of our business ecosystem.”
