CallFire Turns to BlazeMeter To Ensure the 2016 US Elections Will Be a Performance Success

ABOUT CALLFIRE

CallFire provides user-friendly, intuitive voice and text connectivity products to over 100,000 businesses. The company is dedicated to providing high-availability systems, intuitive user interfaces, dedicated developer support, and unparalleled customer care. CallFire’s customers include small business owners, nonprofits, political groups, insurance agents, and marketers.

THE CHALLENGE

On any given day, Callfire must manage millions of calls and messages in order to carry out the marketing, promotional and customer service activities of its customers.

Being able to effectively prepare for and manage volume and capacity is especially important to CallFire during the 2016 US elections as its voice and SMS services are used - by several high-profile political candidates, Super PACs, activist groups and non-profit organizations - to reach out to large lists of potential voters and donors. Campaigns utilize CallFire’s technology in their call centers, and it is critical that it is able to perform well.

Furthermore the previous testing method that CallFire utilized required a very high number of human resources, as well as time. As it would decided it would be costly to develop a JMeter-based testing tool themselves, and since the company was also looking for a solution that could easily integrate with its other tools for continuous integration and application monitoring, they searched for an external SaaS solution that was able to meet their needs.

THE SOLUTION

To equip its platform to manage a higher volume of traffic, CallFire utilizes BlazeMeter’s continuous performance testing solution. This includes simulating and testing for thousands of concurrent users generating tens of thousands of concurrent calls. At the same time, Callfire uses BlazeMeter for its Cloud Call Center solution, simulating thousands of concurrent agents making thousands of concurrent calls.

CallFire works with BlazeMeter to continuously test a variety of traffic scenarios using a mix of Selenium Webdriver to drive traffic to their website and JMeter to exercise their API. With this approach, they can quickly observe the impact of load on a variety of systems, analyze traffic patterns and system stress through New Relic and Zabbix. BlazeMeter’s ability to combine a variety of open-source testing tools and APM technologies provides a clear picture of the potential traffic impact on performance, helping CallFire alert its DevOps teams when it’s time to add capacity.

THE RESULTS

CallFire’s Cloud Call Center system went from effectively handling 300 simultaneous agents to handling more than 2,000 agents. With all products combined, Callfire is now successfully handing approximately 30,000 simultaneous calls. With BlazeMeter, CallFire was able to locate performance bottlenecks in advance.

The end result is a development team that puts performance testing at the heart of DevOps and continuous delivery, with clear and consistent insights to keep the platform running smoothly. As a result of BlazeMeter tests, the development team has made several system changes to better handle inbound and outbound volume. In a time where platform performance is especially crucial, BlazeMeter is depended upon to ensure system reliability.

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