Opera

Connecting millions of consumers worldwide

Opera products enable more than 350 million internet consumers to discover and connect with the content and services that matter most to them, no matter the device, network or location. Opera also delivers products and services to more than 120 operators around the world, enabling them to provide a faster, more economical and smoother network experience to their subscribers.

Setting up Pingdom monitoring quickly

Opera already has an internally developed monitoring and measurement system in place, running from different global data centers. However, it decided to use Pingdom to monitor from locations outside of its control. “We wanted to measure and improve our availability from all corners of the globe,” says Michael Link, Vice President of Product Development (Services) at Opera.

Having used Pingdom at a previous employer, Michael Link was no stranger to the service. The startup process was quick, to say the least. “In short, I punched in my credit card details and turned it on,” Link recalls. “After a while, we improved the set of URLs that we wanted to monitor and made setting up Pingdom checks part of our regular routine.”

Opera also uses Pingdom alerts as a safety measure for cross checking the internal alerting systems. Sometimes, Pingdom highlights problems specific to some regions of the world that Opera’s internal systems don’t.

Optimizing opera.com with Real User Monitoring

Michael Link and Opera have since extended their use of Pingdom’s monitoring services. “Pingdom data helps us see whether something is wrong with one of our services, from different locations around the world. If we spot problems with our servers or connectivity to them, we can make the necessary improvements,” says Link. Opera has a team of engineers on call, so it can respond very quickly to any problem with its systems.

Today, Opera uses Real User Monitoring to optimize its main download site, opera.com. “The Real User Monitoring feature has helped us optimize our website and downloads, while the real-time page-loading-time data per country has been particularly useful,” says Link. “The service is powerful, yet easy to use, and offers significant value for money,” adds Link.