PRISA is one of the Spanish-speaking world’s leading media companies. With brands including El Pais, Santillana, and El Huffpost, they are at the forefront of communications and education. Present in 24 countries, with an audience of more than 168 million unique browsers, their mission is to produce and distribute high-quality content to their audience.

Scaling an Evolving Business

PRISA manages hundreds of different information systems built with Cloud-Native technologies helping them scale their platform. In order to move faster and keep up with the pace of evolution, they realized the need to reduce the complexity of their stack as they still had a number of systems built over obsolete technologies that needed to be replaced or removed,

‘Managing performance in such complex environments is really difficult. There are a lot of different pieces and dependencies. When we have a performance problem, trying to find the root cause is difficult and very time consuming” explains Jorge Tome Hernando, Director of IT Architecture, Operations, Security and Workplace for PRISA Tecnologia.

For PRISA, performance is key. When they encounter a performance problem, it has an immediate and detrimental impact on the business performance and the consumer’s perception of their brand. “A one-second time difference in displaying content makes a huge difference to our audience’s experience.”

Despite having several monitoring solutions in place, PRISA lacked the end-to-end visibility into their applications, infrastructure, and underlying services they needed to ensure application performance. “We had insight into how our infrastructure was running. But we did not have vision into the processes of the overlapping technologies. Connecting the points and understanding the relationships was the difficult part.” 

New Solution, New Possibilities

While working with their technology partner, Hopla! Software, PRISA was introduced to Instana and quickly gained the end-end visibility that they required.

With Instana’s easy, single-agent deployment, PRISA gained immediate results. “The deployment is easy, very easy. The cost is reasonable and indexed to the volume of the infrastructure, NOT to the volume of the traffic we manage, which was really important to us managing such high volumes of traffic.”

PRISA appreciated Instana’s automatic and continuous discovery to combat the complexity of their Cloud-Native stack and all of its moving pieces.

“Our infrastructure is very liquid; servers and services appear and disappear dynamically based on demand. Instana automatically visualizes our applications and infrastructure in real-time, helping us discover business dependencies that we didn’t know existed.”

In the end, it was an easy decision to select Instana – this was down to three key factors: Cost, ease of deployment and the evolving pace of the platform.

Avoiding Problems Before they Occur

Engineering time, especially when keeping services performing, is very costly for organizations. Even more so for publishers; where page load times are a critical metric for consumer experiences and revenue streams.

With Instana, PRISA can resolve application issues before they impact customers. Keeping their systems operating efficiently is no longer an issue, allowing them to free up engineering resources that can be used to innovate, evolve and improve their services to better compete in the marketplace.

“Instana provides a complete vision of how our services are running, helping us achieve our goals of performance, reliability and cost optimization.”