Murphy USA Puts ExtraHop in Its Application Performance

EL DORADO, Ark. – Murphy USA hopped at the opportunity to use ExtraHop to gain real-time visibility of application performance at all of its 1,175 convenience stores and gas stations in 23 U.S. states.

Specifically, Murphy USA wanted to ensure application performance for the stores that share a single 10Mbps VSAT link. The retailer evaluated more than 25 vendors over three months and chose the ExtraHop information technology (IT) intelligence platform based on its "non-invasive deployment, ease of use and superior analysis capabilities."

"The distributed and bandwidth-constrained nature of the environment means that our network team is the first to take the call when something goes wrong, whether it is a network or application problem," said Micah Rodgers, senior network security engineer at Murphy USA. "We’re the ones that get the call at 2 a.m. asking, ‘Why can’t we sell gas?’ We are responsible for fielding issues that would normally be assigned to the Application Support group and so [we] need visibility into application and system performance — even if we don’t have access to those systems."

According to ExtraHop, its unique visibility into wire data has enabled Murphy USA to install a single appliance in its primary datacenter and answer previously intractable questions.

"Murphy USA’s situation is a classic example of how application fluency and transaction-level visibility can empower IT operations teams," said Jesse Rothstein, CEO of Seattle-based ExtraHop. "Murphy USA needed an operational intelligence platform to help troubleshoot performance issues for a wide variety of applications, while doing it all in real time with no resource overhead and without running afoul of payment card industry regulations by storing packets."

El Dorado, Ark.-based Murphy USA is a division of Murphy Oil Corp.