LinkedIn: Delivering Reliable Experiences at Global Scale
LinkedIn is the world’s largest professional network, connecting more than one billion members across more than 200 countries and territories. Delivering a fast, reliable digital experience for users worldwide requires a complex infrastructure that spans both internally managed services and third-party providers.
For LinkedIn’s Site Reliability Engineers (SREs), maintaining visibility across this distributed environment is essential to ensuring performance, availability, and a consistent user experience regardless of location.
Challenge: Limited Visibility Across a Distributed Global Infrastructure
LinkedIn relies on a broad ecosystem of internet infrastructure providers, including:
- Three Domain Name System (DNS) resolution services
- Five Content Delivery Networks (CDNs)
- An internal CDN
Managing performance across multiple providers and regions created visibility challenges. The team needed a better way to understand how infrastructure choices affected end-user experience, particularly in regions where internet performance and provider reliability can vary significantly.
Results: Improved Visibility, Faster Issue Resolution, and Better User Experiences
With Catchpoint in place, LinkedIn established active observability testing across its global infrastructure and gained the data needed to make more informed performance decisions.
Access to More Than 600 Global Monitoring Agents
By leveraging Catchpoint’s worldwide monitoring network, LinkedIn gained visibility into ISP and infrastructure performance across the regions most important to its business. This enabled the team to evaluate how different providers performed from actual user locations.
Faster Identification of Vendor-Level Issues
Using real-time performance data and customizable thresholds, LinkedIn’s SRE team can quickly identify performance degradations and determine whether issues originate from DNS providers, CDNs, or other third-party services.
The ability to isolate and communicate root causes helps accelerate remediation efforts and improve vendor accountability.
“[With Catchpoint], We’re always able to present the data that’s important, in any fashion that we want.”
Key Benefits of Catchpoint for LinkedIn
- Reporting tools > Faster identification of root causes at the vendor level
- Global node network > Better replication of real-world user experiences in the locations that matter to LinkedIn
- Header-level page insights > Improved site optimization and latency reduction
- Webhooks > Streamlined data transfer between Catchpoint and LinkedIn’s internal systems
