Pete’s Take: Catchpoint at Cloud Field Day 22
Tech Field Day always produces such great technical content! However, it can be a challenge keeping up with it due to sheer quantity. I have to prioritize, focus on companies that I consider “interesting”. Or tech areas I want to know more about.
When catching up on a specific TechFieldDay event blogs and videos, I find it helpful to flatten the link hierarchy some, or even to go through and pull out the video links, per vendor. That makes it easier for me to methodically review the content.
I’ve just done that for Cloud Field Day 22 (#CFD22). The relevant links can be found at the end of this blog. I hope that means you can spend more time with the content!
My immediate purpose in doing this was to start reviewing and blogging about a couple of the presenting organizations. Starting with Catchpoint.
So: about Catchpoint. Or me catching up on Catchpoint via their presentation at CFD22.
What Does Catchpoint Do?: Application and Internet Monitoring, Application and Internet Performance Analysis, User Experience Monitoring, Internet Observability. Like APM tools but more focused on Internet, Cloud, and Internet-based Services.
Quick Blog Summary: There’s some great content in the CFD22 videos. This blog includes several screen captures, intended to inspire you to watch the videos!
It’s been a while since I reviewed any Catchpoint content. After a prior Tech Field Day (TFD) event, I did a small paid writing assignment (see the gestaltit.com links below), and was quite impressed with what I learned about Catchpoint.
One demo that stuck with me involved determining that selected slow page loads were tied to the loading time for a single video clip. Waterfall diagrams for web pages FTW!
Catchpoint is an impressive company, with (to a degree) some major competition: Cisco, Kentik, and others. The overall Application Performance Management space is huge, encompassing onsite apps, cloud apps, Internet user experience, and more. Catchpoint emphasizes their focus is Internet Performance Management, “IPM”.
Some of My Prior Words re Catchpoint
Here are links to what I’ve previously blogged and “articled” about Catchpoint:
About Catchpoint
The Catchpoint story is about monitoring key Internet/Cloud services used by applications, so you know THAT an application may be running slow, and WHY that might be the case.
Towards the end of their presentations, Catchpoint mentioned “false negatives”. You don’t want to be in the situation of having no alarms yet your key app or apps aren't working. That’s even worse than “false positives”, false alarms. So they provide a lot of coverage to minimize gaps in your awareness.
Catchpoint packages up their Internet monitoring via graphics that quickly show problems, and time and scope. In most cases their reporting provides drill-down or selective filtering to help you home in on problems.
Catchpoint as a company supports over 300 global companies/brands as customers.
I’ve included a lot of screen captures in the following for two reasons:
The following one marketing screen seems like a good starting point for Catchpoint, listing what they view as their key differentiators.
Catchpoint noted that the 1990’s were about on-prem internal networks, the 2010’s brought in cloud, SaaS, and hybrid networks. And now, apps and troubleshooting are Internet centric and distributed.
Catchpoint CFD22 Videos
The CFD22 presentations with Catchpoint can be found at:
I recommend the last two in particular. Very useful for seeing some of the product’s capabilities. The first two videos were also interesting, but more discussion, background, and what the market needs.
Catchpoint CFD22 Blogs
I found only the following CFD22 blog on the Tech Field Day Catchpoint page:
Some Catchpoint at CFD22 Notes
For this blog, I watched the videos and took notes. The following covers some of the especially note-worthy things.
According to Catchpoint, what’s key is having a lot of relevant data already in hand, so you are immediately alerted to potential problems, and can start analyzing them immediately.
What impressed me was the wealth of different graphical views the product offers. To that end, I’ve included a lot of representative screen captures in this blog. I’m hoping those teasers will motivate you to go watch the videos!
What’s not so good with a key app is what I’ll call incremental data collection, where a problem occurs, only then do you go get some data. No idea what was happening at the time of the problem. Then you rule something out, then collect different data, repeat while time flies (my wording). Having the necessary data in hand from problem onset also lets you see where things are working OK, which can be useful when troubleshooting. Versus just checking one known failure / path.
To that end, Catchpoint leverages their network of about 3000 intelligent global agents placed in key locations close to (but not inside) Internet providers, last mile providers, 4G/5G providers, etc.
The agents collect performance data on services like DNS, SSH, HTTPS. They alert when things are slow or not working. The “close to” emphasizes the point that you want to know what close access to the CSP (etc.) looks like, independent of whether they’re down, or problems between the probe and the CSP, etc.? In other words, what the CSP’s performance looks like, from close to the service point but outside the CSP network.
The following screen capture summarizes what Catchpoint does.
Catchpoint describes their approach as “end user first monitoring”, focused on what matters: DNS, CDN’s, CSP’s, etc. The goal is detect earlier, solve quickly, saving time. Buying time to analyze and react. The overall goal: answer the business problem as quickly as possible.
Some of this comes down to monitoring critical components of your apps.
Catchpoint noted that many problems are due to “unknown unknowns”: things you’ve never seen before, maybe don’t even know you have that problem.
For example, perhaps the key web page load used to be 1.5 seconds, but is now going to 7 seconds, across all ISP’s, Akamai, all sites.
Or (second example with the graph below): some response times normal, some showing increasing delays over time.
That one turned out to be a memory leak on older code on some of the web servers. It caused increasing slowness over time on those servers.
Catchpoint then discussed how complex modern applications are, and the need for visibiilty of the various Internet Stack layers.
Since Catchpoint monitors every path, you can swing traffic away from paths with a problem.
The Cool Stuff
Videos 3 and 4 in the list above got into some of the nifty capabilties of Catchpoint.
The Internet Stack Map displays dependencies for a service, both internal and external.
CatchPoint can auto identify the stack, app dependencies, and impacts over time. This can help improve Ops/SRE efficiency: “you don’t have to know or figure out the app dependencies”. It also highlights the most likely cause of issues. And you can refine that for key applications, if needed.
CatchPoint also uses its probes to produce the Internet Sonar report, showing a global view outages. This can help you decide whether there’s something you can do about an outage.
CatchPoint can do Webpage Instant Tests to figure out why a website is slow. They also do Real User Monitoring (“RUM”). See the presentation to see what both IPM and RUM screens look like.
You should also look at the last video to see various Internet Performance Monitoring (“IPM”) screens.
CatchPoint: The Next Level
CatchPoint noted their platform is very customizable, e.g. alerting methods. Customers also pull data into their data lakes, either via API or a direct feed. This facilitates using AIOps or ServiceNow etc. to open tickets automatically.
CatchPoint does mobile RUM, and is working with the cellular OpenTelephony SDK for iOS and Android.
The fourth CatchPoint video went into a user-centric scenario, demonstrating a movie ticket app they built for demo purposes. I’ve folded discussion of that into the above.
Key CFD22 Collateral
As promised at the top of this blog, here are the key CFD22 links.
Clicking on the links in the Presentation Calendar part of CFD22 page takes you to each vendor’s video content from CFD22, along with summary text. (…/appearance/vendor-presents-at-cloud-field-day-22). Thus:
Alternatively, clicking on the “presenting company” logos takes you to the TFD per-company pages, which include current and prior blogs and videos. Thus:
Note that on these company pages, the video presentations seem to usually be posted in reverse order, i.e. the last CFD22 video on the page is the first one delivered.
It can be worth doing Google search as well when looking for delegate blogs — the blog listings reflect what TFD staff was aware of. That depends on just how much you care about every delegate’s take, of course!
Miscellany
Reminder: you may want to check back on my articles on LinkedIn to review any comments or comment threads. They can be a quick way to have a discussion, correct me, or share you perspectives on technology.
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