NFD23 - CatchPoint
CatchPoint present their Digital Experience Monitoring platform on the first day of NFD23.
How it works, very short version
CatchPoint provides a monitoring platform for SaaS and custom services.
Monitoring nodes can run on CatchPoint infrastructure and on clients, servers and containers provided by the users.
When running clients (Mac and Win) the monitoring node can function in active mode, executing synthetic tests from a locally installed agent, or passive tests, getting performance data from the browser sessions.
All the results are collected in a dashboard provided as SaaS.
Great for Ops team
CatchPoint is a tool every Ops team may want, providing the ability to easily spot connectivity problems around the globe
Monitoring application performances from multiple vantage points, this is the visibility that any Ops team needs. @Catchpoint has plenty of options, including agents on endpoints #NFD23
— Gian Paolo (@gp_ifconfig) September 29, 2020
The monitoring nodes in public networks are located in cloud providers and in the main datacenters around the globe, with uplink connection on multiple providers. Nodes can monitor each connection independently to spot issues in a very granular way.
That means in can answer questions about the quality of the connection from a specific ISP in a particular datacenter to a SaaS service like O365, Azure or AWS.
Have a look of the recent O365 outgate and how Catchpoint noticed it soon.
Great for strategy and network planning
CatchPoint can also provide insights for planning where to locate customer's network hubs. When choosing the best colocation for DC services, a quick look can show how SaaS perform from that location.
The same data can be used to evaluate a new ISP before signing the connection contract: "Sorry pal, your connection to O365 is not good enough in that region".
Licensing
CatchPoint licensing seems flexible enough to start small and increase based on the actual use. It can be licensed with a pay-per-use subscription or customers can buy some credits in advance to run tests on-demand or less frequently. This is very important to allow medium companies to leverage the tool with a small upfront cost.
Wrap-up
Monitoring used to be an internal tool. Today many services rely on the Internet for transport and cloud providers for SaaS, the monitoring tools must evolve and be able to have a global view. CatchPoint provides the necessary visibility and analytics to monitor the performances of network, apps and SaaS.