Catchpoint unveiled its fall 2024 update, introducing a suite of substantial new features within its Internet Performance Monitoring platform.

WEBINAR OCT 17: Catchpoint Fall 2024 Product Launch Event

Designed to help IT teams better align with business objectives and strengthen digital resilience, these new features continue to cement Catchpoint as the vital platform for protecting today’s complex online environments. Headed into the most crucial quarter of the year across sectors as teams look to wrap up projects, hit targets and set the tone for the coming year, Catchpoint offers IT teams the world's largest observability network with industry-leading AI improvements to Internet Sonar that provide increased visibility to monitor critical areas of the network stack during this critical time.

Slow Is the New Down

As the technologies powering front-end experiences become increasingly complex and customer expectations rise, website speed is more crucial than ever. According to Catchpoint's upcoming research, a slow website is effectively a non-working website. To help enterprises optimize their website performance, Catchpoint has introduced several key updates:

WebPageTest Integration: WebPageTest, the gold standard in web performance optimization, has now been seamlessly incorporated into the Catchpoint IPM Platform. Customers enjoy a unified view of real-time web performance, covering everything from front-end performance to end user experience with insights from worldwide locations.

■ With AI-powered Smartboards, users can schedule tests, identify trends, and receive alerts for WebPageTest metrics, correlating these insights with real user data (RUM) and incorporating web vitals into Experience Level Objective (XLO) tracking.

■ Opportunities and experiments provide web performance optimization recommendations and no-code experiments assess the real-world impact of suggested optimizations before implementing on your live site.

■ WebPageTest video recordings and Core Web Vital highlights not only show the entire video of your critical user journeys; they also pinpoint focus areas where components impact the different Core Web Vitals.

Real User Monitoring (RUM): Catchpoint has enhanced its Real User Monitoring (RUM) with new metrics such as error clicks, thrashed cursor, dead clicks and rage clicks in addition to others like Interaction to Next Paint (INP). These metrics are unified into a simple Smartboard view, providing comprehensive insights into actual user interactions and overall application performance.

The Internet Is Your New Network

With the modern Internet Stack playing a critical role in delivering digital experiences, businesses increasingly rely on Catchpoint’s instrumentation as their main tool for monitoring the end-user journey. There is a tremendous amount of telemetry data generated as part of today’s modern observability frameworks. With AI simplification from pioneering enhancements like Internet Stack Map and Internet Sonar, IT can provide relevant business benefits by quickly filtering important signals to minify the impact of costly incidents.

"As the Internet Stack plays a vital role in delivering exceptional digital experiences created by your application, an increasing number of businesses are relying on Catchpoint’s instrumentation as their main tool for monitoring end-user experience," says Mehdi Daoudi, CEO of Catchpoint. "They require visibility from the user's perspective to the code level and need to comprehend the entire pathway of their third-party integrations and dependencies to identify—and rectify—any disruptions to those experiences," he further explains.

■ Internet Stack Map enables automatic creation of custom topology service maps of key Internet Stack services and dependencies with AI simplification and correlation of Internet Sonar data providing a live and detailed view of everything impacting an application. Catchpoint has also added the correlation of Ping and Traceroute test types, as well as Ping RTT and Packet Loss Metrics throughout Stack Map. This improves your visibility of how network problems impact your service performance.

■ Internet Sonar detects outages in major services across the internet and correlates them with the services you’re monitoring in your Internet Stack. When incidents occur, this helps you to quickly answer “Is it me or something else?” Catchpoint has added the ability to filter Sonar overview and custom dashboards to a Stack Map. This improvement lets you see outages only for services represented in the Stack Map. If your Stack Map includes region filters, those are also represented in the filtered Sonar view. We have also enhanced ease of use with additional incident sidebar, multiple filtering options and alerts.

■ The world’s largest observability network continues to grow. Catchpoint has added vantage points in 41 cities and across 37 ISPs. This brings the depth and breadth of their coverage to over 100 countries and over 300 cities, approaching 3000 vantage points across backbone, last mile, wireless, and cloud nodes.

■ Enterprise Nodes can be placed on customers' premises extending the full feature/function set of the largest observability network to anywhere there is an internet connection. In this release Catchpoint is now adding a light version of these nodes. Designed to be installed in remote offices, retail stores, and other facilities, these agents are extremely lightweight, flexible, and support a wider range of environments including Raspberry Pi to provide enterprises a path to easily monitor from locations with limited or no direct IT support from behind your firewall.

■ Node-to-node testing offers high-frequency, bidirectional monitoring from more locations, such as between datacenters and cloud providers, or from one cloud provider to another. Customers may run node-to-node tests between enterprise nodes or between enterprise and public nodes with frequencies as low as one minute

CI/CD Automation and AI: A Catalyst for DevOps Culture

Eliminating repetitive, time-consuming tasks is essential for DevOps success. Catchpoint has released new automated capabilities to further enable Internet Performance Monitoring as code.
CI/CD Integration: Catchpoint supports several different ways to integrate Monitoring as Code in a CI/CD pipeline. Users can now create test configurations, run ad-hoc tests on new releases, and trigger automated actions through Catchpoint's REST API. Enhanced browser automation and testing with Playwright and Puppeteer allow users to handle complex web interactions effortlessly, with support for multiple windows and custom certificates. For example, we have customers who create new test configurations as new features are released using the REST API, tag deployments, run ad-hoc tests on new release builds, notify stakeholders or trigger actions using alert webhook or emails, and send all data to their own data warehouse to combine with other data sources for business KPI reporting. Playwright and Puppeteer scripting now support the use of Personal Certificates for URLs that require them.

“Catchpoint has had an incredible year of innovation in the IPM market. This is due to the true partnership we have developed with our customers and our relentless drive to reduce MTTR. Our focus to accelerate early identification of incidents is significantly enhanced with AI-powered capabilities such as root-cause analysis,” added Daoudi.