Case Study: Hotwire achieves faster troubleshooting and bandwidth cost savings with Riverbed AppResponse Xpert

Hotwire - Customer Case Study

Hotwire.com is a leading discount travel site whose business depends on a highly available, secure and responsive online experience. The networking team lacked visibility into the unpredictable public Internet—making it hard to monitor user experience, localize performance problems, balance bandwidth costs, or collaborate effectively with software engineers—so troubleshooting was often guesswork and iterative tweaks.

Hotwire installed Riverbed AppResponse Xpert in its co-location facility, which was live in about 30 minutes and delivered real-time and historical application and network metrics. The appliance lets the team drill down from high-level response-time composition to ISP, AS and IP details (e.g., time-to-first-byte vs. retransmissions), enabling much faster problem localization, improved engineering collaboration, and significant bandwidth cost savings by routing traffic through lower-cost ISPs—paying for itself in a matter of months and allowing rapid, business-focused reporting.

Hotwire

Brian Tam

Senior Network Engineer