Network Field Day 23: Catchpoint Monitors Digital Experience
My overall take on Network Field Day 23 (“NFD23”) can be found on the NetCraftsmen blog page. I’m following that up with vendor-specific blogs on LinkedIn, summarizing what I found noteworthy and with more links to videos, etc. The goal is to inform you about the technology while enabling you decide which NFD23 vendor presentations you might want to watch!
Do bear in mind that the videos contain a LOT more information than can possibly fit into a blog!
TL;DR: This is a vendor-specific blog about Catchpoint, based on my notes and screen captures, reflecting what I thought was note-worthy. See also the above overall take blog, which comments on some general network management themes that I detected in the NFD23 presentations.
About Catchpoint
Catchpoint provides monitoring via synthetic probes, from internal or cloud-based agents to key application or other endpoints, with centralized cloud control and many forms of reporting. It also provides RUM capabilities: real user monitoring.
Catchpoint competes with Cisco’s ThousandEyes (and several other products, in some ways).
The basic idea behind such products is to send synthetic traffic from an agent to a destination. The probe format can vary. Here’s a table from Catchpoint’s website:
That represents a lot of probe types!
How Does It Work?
You use the Catchpoint central management site to tell the distributed agents what to monitor. What that does for you is provides data into what applications are reachable, delays, etc.
When HTTP is used, Catchpoint understands all the actions the target web page might take, and can break out components of delay in a waterfall view. Catchpoint can also do real-time actual user monitoring.
Here is a screen capture of a waterfall view report.
What all this does for you is provides a baseline, so you can detect and alert when significant changes or outages occur. It can also help you spot which hop in a patch is causing packet loss or adding significant delay.
Catchpoint provides two types of agents:
- End user agent (VM, container – cf. Docker hub) (freemium version)
- Enterprise node (dedicated device)
Catchpoint also provides a large number of global agents for outside-in monitoring. That can provide data on regional slowness or outages accessing your business web pages, for example.
Here is an example Catchpoint dashboard:
Another use case for Catchpoint monitoring is outage patterns: what locations can my users no longer access, or what regions cannot access our corporate web page.
The end user agent monitors WiFi signal strength, among other things.
Here is a screen capture showing the reporting tool, with a great variety of options (note the left side):
Differences from Competitors
- A wide variety of data plots are available.
- High quality detailed data.
- Endpoint probes with selected WFH monitoring capability
- Large pool of global probes of various types (see above screen capture).
- Catchpoint supports API’s and integration with other tools such as Slack, Splunk, and ServiceNow.
- WebSee: global outage tracking site for popular applications leveraging probes
Pricing
A free trial version is available.
Catchpoint pricing for enterprise generally starts at $25,000. My notes on this topic are thin. I believe that buys you a number of probe “points”. Each time a poll or probe is sent, it consumes one point. How long that lasts depends on how often you poll and how many different polls you run.
I suggest you talk to Catchpoint for more details – web search is not turning up much.
NetCraftsmen and Catchpoint
My employer, NetCraftsmen, thinks highly of Catchpoint, as do I. We are partners with Catchpoint, use it for troubleshooting, and resell it as an optional part of our managed services offerings. It has become particularly popular during COVID WFH, for monitoring the home user experience.
See also:
- Digital Experience (Dx) Monitoring – Intermittent BGP
- Why You Should Use Digital Experience Monitoring
Conclusions
Catchpoint provides digital user experience monitoring with a large pool of global monitoring agents and a strong back-end reporting capability.
References
Blogs and recorded videos from NFD23 about Catchpoint are available – just follow the link at the beginning of this sentence! In particular, you can check out what other NFD23 delegates had to say about the product, or watch the videos for more detail.
If you want to start viewing other video recordings of NFD23, follow that NFD23 link and click on the appropriate vendor icon. That’ll take you to a page listing the videos available as well as blogs, both for NFD23 and prior Tech Field Day events.
Comments
Comments are welcome, both in agreement or constructive disagreement about the above. I enjoy hearing from readers and carrying on deeper discussion via comments. Thanks in advance!
Hashtags: #NetCraftsmen #CiscoChampion #TheNetcraftsmenWay #NFD23
Twitter: @pjwelcher
LinkedIn: Peter Welcher
