Innovate or Perish IT Organizations Must Rethink Observability in the Cloud Age with Catchpoint

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.