Catchpoint announced Network Insights, an out-of-the-box network visibility solution that addresses a major visibility gap for IT teams responsible for delivering high performing digital services to customers and employees.

Network Insights combines new Border Gateway Protocol (BGP) monitoring with existing Domain Name System (DNS), Traceroute, Enterprise and Endpoint monitoring to provide full visibility into all network layers. This proactive network monitoring solution allows enterprises to eliminate blind spots created by the unstoppable migration of apps and services to the cloud and increasing use of the internet to deliver services to customers and employees.

Traditional network monitoring products aimed at legacy data center deployments are simply incompatible with modern digital delivery chains. They rely on expensive physical probes and appliances to collect and analyze network traffic. In contrast, Catchpoint’s Network Insights offers enterprises instant network visibility, without deploying probes, appliances, software consoles or complex agents. The return on investment is immediate.

This immediate customer ROI and instant visibility is possible thanks to Catchpoint’s approach to monitoring. Network Insights is powered by Catchpoint’s Global Monitoring Network, deployed in more than 825 backbone, broadband, wireless, cloud, and last mile locations around the globe. This allows teams to proactively detect network-related issues and identify their root causes quickly from any geography where end users are located, decreasing mean-time-to-repair (MTTR) and mean-time-to-detect (MTTD), therefore protecting the end-user experience.

“Cloud, SaaS and the Internet are incredible digital transformation enablers, but they create huge visibility gaps as enterprises are losing direct control of infrastructure and applications. The network is often the culprit for degraded digital performance and network engineering teams need insights to understand how the network is affecting customer and employee experiences and equally important, gain actionable data for improving performance,” says Mehdi Daoudi, CEO and co-founder of Catchpoint. “Integrated visibility across the end user, the application and all network components can now finally provide the comprehensive network level view our customers require.”

Catchpoint’s Network Insights consists of the following four components:

- BGP Monitoring: BGP is a protocol that manages how packets are routed across the internet via the exchange of information between edge routers. Changes in BGP routes – either through malicious attacks or human error – can negatively affect service availability, directly impacting end users. Catchpoint’s advanced BGP monitoring quickly detects problems such as route hijacks, policy configuration issues, route flaps and peering issues, and surveys route health and events such as announcements or withdrawals.

- DNS Monitoring: Catchpoint is the only vendor to offer two types of DNS monitoring: DNS Direct and DNS Experience. DNS Direct tests directly query name servers to provide availability data and ensure the responses delivered are accurate. DNS Experience tests emulate recursive nameservers to measure latency and availability of servers in the DNS resolution chain.

- Traceroute Monitoring: Powered by the most widely distributed testing infrastructure in the industry, this feature provides visualizations of the network path (including multi-cloud and hybrid cloud environments) from all over the globe with autonomous systems (AS) and router granularity. This allows teams to collect data from every hop so they can pinpoint root causes quickly. Understanding what is causing latency and/or packet loss helps network teams quickly solve router issues or peering problems to reduce end user impact.

- Enterprise and Endpoint Monitoring: Catchpoint Enterprise nodes are deployed within the enterprise network and provide bidirectional detection of performance problems with on-prem hosted applications or degraded employee experiences. Complementary to this, Catchpoint’s Endpoint monitoring reaches all the way into the employee device, collecting and analyzing from the employee’s browser and workstation, eliminating what is often the final visibility gap. Both provide the ability to run continuous traceroutes to collect and analyze network data.