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 Mehdi Daoudi and Brandon DeLap presented for Catchpoint at Cloud Field Day 22 |
Innovate or Perish: IT Organizations Must Rethink Monitoring in the Cloud Age
Despite heavy investments, incidents and outages are not going away (they are getting worse) Catchpoint offer our thoughts on how the Internet is your new application platform, a re-envisioning of monitoring to adapt and account for these factors as Internet Performance Monitoring (IPM). Catchpoint look beyond the constraints of traditional tools like application performance monitoring and will show how some of our customers have benefitted from this new way of thinking.
Catchpoint provides amazingly unique capabilities to solve these problems
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Focused on Monitoring Internet User Experience Introducing Catchpoint
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Catchpoint, founded in 2008 by Mehdi Daoudi and two others, focuses monitoring on the user experience rather than solely on the application stack. Daoudi’s experience at DoubleClick, where he was responsible for resolving a major outage, solidified his belief that performance monitoring is not just an IT concern, but a critical business imperative impacting revenue, brand reputation, and employee morale. Catchpoint works with large global organizations, emphasizing the importance of trust and reliability in maintaining customer relationships and preventing costly outages.
The company advocates for an end-user-centric approach to monitoring, arguing that traditional infrastructure-up methods are insufficient in today’s complex, distributed environments. They highlight the inefficiency of waiting for massive error thresholds to trigger alerts, emphasizing the need to detect problems early, before they impact customers and cause brand damage. Catchpoint uses real-world examples of how their platform has helped companies identify and resolve performance issues much more quickly than using traditional methods, saving time, money, and reputational harm.
Daoudi stressed that many organizations overcomplicate their monitoring strategies, accumulating excessive data that hinders rather than helps problem solving. He advocates for a simpler, more focused approach where monitoring is designed to answer specific business questions related to key user actions and business outcomes. He draws on examples from Google, highlighting their performance-driven culture and the importance of designing for performance from the outset. Ultimately, Catchpoint aims to help businesses move beyond reactive troubleshooting to proactive, user-experience-driven monitoring to ensure that their digital services are consistently reliable and meet user expectations.
Personnel: Mehdi Daoudi
Innovate or Perish IT Organizations Must Rethink Observability in the Cloud Age with Catchpoint
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Catchpoint’s presentation at Cloud Field Day highlighted the critical dependence of modern organizations on digital experiences for business operations and employee productivity. The increasing frequency of outages and performance issues underscores the limitations of traditional application-centric monitoring. By shifting to proactive user experience monitoring, Catchpoint argues, organizations can prevent costly incidents, improve revenue generation, and boost employee satisfaction. This approach is vital in today’s complex digital landscape where users expect the flawless performance seen in companies like Google, Apple, and TikTok.
Mehdi Daoudi, CEO of Catchpoint, emphasized the growing complexity of modern applications, which often involve numerous third-party vendors, CDNs, and cloud providers, resulting in hundreds of requests per web page. This complexity necessitates a shift from reactive to proactive monitoring. Catchpoint’s solution offers an “internet-centric” approach, visualizing the entire internet stack and providing insights into the performance of every component, even those outside the direct control of the organization. This complements existing APM tools by providing an “outside-in” perspective, enabling faster identification and resolution of issues.
The presentation showcased how Catchpoint’s Sonar solution, combined with real-user and synthetic data, allows organizations to identify problems proactively, even those caused by external factors like fiber cuts. This data can empower manual or automated remediation efforts, for example, by dynamically rerouting traffic to alternative CDNs or cloud providers based on performance. Catchpoint also highlighted the growing trend toward AI-driven automation, using insights from monitoring data to create automated playbooks and runbooks for resolving performance issues, furthering the shift toward a proactive and autonomous IT management strategy.
Personnel: Mehdi Daoudi
The Internet Performance Mamagement (IPM) Platform with Catchpoint
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Catchpoint’s Internet Performance Monitoring (IPM) platform proactively ensures the resilience and performance of digital experiences. The platform’s core function is to reduce mean time to repair (MTTR) by enabling detection, identification, escalation, and validation of issues. This is achieved through a multi-faceted approach that goes beyond simply identifying symptoms, such as a slow website, to pinpoint the root cause through triangulation of data from various sources.
Central to Catchpoint’s approach is its use of “mystery shoppers,” or synthetic monitoring agents, deployed globally across various ISPs and even in residential locations to provide a comprehensive view of performance from the end-user perspective. This is complemented by real user monitoring (RUM) using JavaScript beacons, BGP data collection for network-level insights, and integrations with tools like WebPageTest.org and Tundra for deeper application performance analysis. All this data feeds into a central platform for dashboards, alerting, and analysis.
The platform provides a holistic view of digital service health, focusing on accessibility, uptime, speed, and reliability. Key features include the StackMap visualization for a single-pane-of-glass view of performance, Internet Sonar for AI-driven issue identification, and end-to-end tracing using open telemetry. Catchpoint also offers advanced features like automated experiments to help web developers optimize performance and integrates with various alerting and ticketing systems for seamless workflow integration. The platform’s flexibility allows for customization to meet the specific needs of diverse organizations, from simple alert routing to sophisticated data integration with observability platforms.
Personnel: Mehdi Daoudi
The IPM Platform in Action with Catchpoint
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Catchpoint’s Internet Performance Monitoring (IPM) platform proactively ensures the resilience and performance of digital experiences. The platform’s core function is to reduce mean time to repair (MTTR) by enabling detection, identification, escalation, and validation of issues. This is achieved through a multi-faceted approach that goes beyond simply identifying symptoms, such as a slow website, to pinpoint the root cause through triangulation of data from various sources.
Central to Catchpoint’s approach is its use of “mystery shoppers,” or synthetic monitoring agents, deployed globally across various ISPs and even in residential locations to provide a comprehensive view of performance from the end-user perspective. This is complemented by real user monitoring (RUM) using JavaScript beacons, BGP data collection for network-level insights, and integrations with tools like WebPageTest.org and Tundra for deeper application performance analysis. All this data feeds into a central platform for dashboards, alerting, and analysis.
The platform provides a holistic view of digital service health, focusing on accessibility, uptime, speed, and reliability. Key features include the StackMap visualization for a single-pane-of-glass view of performance, Internet Sonar for AI-driven issue identification, and end-to-end tracing using open telemetry. Catchpoint also offers advanced features like automated experiments to help web developers optimize performance and integrates with various alerting and ticketing systems for seamless workflow integration. The platform’s flexibility allows for customization to meet the specific needs of diverse organizations, from simple alert routing to sophisticated data integration with observability platforms.
Personnel: Brandon DeLap, Mehdi Daoudi