World Wrestling Entertainment (WWE)
WWE is a global sports entertainment company with live events and broadcast programming that mixes professional wrestling with scripted storylines and larger-than-life characters.
Assuring experiences, from the ring to a global audience
WWE streamlined switch management and increased data transmission reliability across its venues and production environments. They also decreased MTTR for network issues.
Speed, scale, and simplify
World Wrestling Entertainment (WWE) produces and broadcasts a multi-channel wrestling experience. Each week, millions of audience members watch this content on TV channels through direct on-demand links and via social media platforms. Live matches at arenas are streamed in weekly shows such as Monday Night Raw and SmackDown, along with monthly pay-per-view events like WrestleMania. Broadcast production trucks are on the road at locations on multiple continents 52 weeks a year. Scripted competitions are captured on video and streamed to studios and the corporate data center in Stamford, Connecticut, for editing and then distribution.
Moving the WWE data center to a new facility provided an opportunity to add more powerful data center switches and to consolidate and simplify management of all switches under a single solution. Network admins had been manually configuring each switch using a command line interface (CLI). With hundreds of switches, this was becoming increasingly time-consuming.
The company decided on Cisco Nexus 9000 Series Switches to support their most critical infrastructure, including editing and graphics workstations, broadcast equipment, voice panels, and communications in the television production facility.
“The Nexus platform allows us to scale out to faster speeds and bandwidth,” says Ralph Riley, Director, Broadcast IT Systems. “It also lets us utilize higher buffer rates to ensure that all of our data—whether it’s storage, video, voice, or audio—is sent seamlessly throughout our network.”
Centralized switch management
WWE took advantage of the Cisco Nexus Dashboard Fabric Controller (NDFC), the data center networking management platform for NX-OS, to radically simplify switch configuration and management.
“We were able to ingest all of our switch interfaces [including those from other vendors] into the Nexus Dashboard Fabric Controller,” says Riley. “Now, instead of manually configuring switches, we are able to seamlessly send out templates, configurations, and policies to our switches, something we could never do before.”
IT staff at WWE are also using Cisco NDFC to push out image updates and network policies using templates—all from a single dashboard for switches. On a daily basis, Cisco NDFC enables WWE admins to monitor their switches, respond to alerts, and detect anomalies within the data center switching infrastructure.
Plans are underway to install Cisco ThousandEyes agents on the Nexus switches in the broadcast facility for better visibility into the connectivity and performance of networking gear in the corporate headquarters and broadcast facilities on the road. Cisco ThousandEyes is a software platform that gives WWE proactive visibility and insights into their end-to-end network performance, enabling fast identification and resolution of issues to ensure reliable transmission of content to broadcast partners.
Assurance with end-to-end visibility
Before investing in new Nexus switches, WWE had already successfully adopted Cisco ThousandEyes, a move that significantly reduced the manual workload of their administrators. Previously, admins faced the daunting task of troubleshooting issues across switches, firewalls, load balancers, and other gear from different vendors, often dealing with disparate datasets.
With Cisco ThousandEyes, WWE expanded its assurance capabilities beyond its own infrastructure to include external domains that were critical for showtime. By deploying Enterprise Agents at headquarters and on traveling production trucks used for filming, WWE can quickly identify issues across their entire digital content supply chain, including issues impacting internet service providers (ISPs) and content delivery networks (CDNs) on the network path. Cisco ThousandEyes proactive synthetic testing allows WWE admins to detect issues that impact experience issues early and resolve them before they impact broadcasts.
“ThousandEyes and the tests we set up and monitor through our dashboards have shown us, for example, when there is latency, loss, and jitter within a particular transmission,” says Riley. “This allows us to make sure there’s reliability within that stream.”
Beginning in January 2025, WWE began streaming Monday Night Raw live to their new partner, Netflix. “Using Cloud Agents in ThousandEyes, we’re able to ensure reliable network transmission of our content, workflows, and processes to Netflix’s cloud infrastructure,” says Riley. “That reliability is of the utmost importance to us from both an IT and business perspective.”
