Catchpoint Internet Performance Monitoring Platform

My main use case for Catchpoint is that it does an excellent job in identifying the entire traffic patterns from the source to destination, and it also provides suggestions for a better path to reach the service much faster.

A specific example of how I used Catchpoint in my previous organization is that we were primarily using it for monitoring our applications and endpoints in specific regions. We were looking for a BGP workflow where the AS group for a particular provider was a lengthier path than the suggested one. Catchpoint was able to identify the particular AS BGP peers and suggest that if we go through this path, it is the fastest way to reach our packets to our destination. The path we had associated with another ISP took a longer time for a response. These features helped us plan in a way that our monitoring improved, our detection time for a particular incident for that application was significantly improved, and we were able to pinpoint exactly where the problem was and come up with a better solution. Based on the suggestion from Catchpoint, the BGP AS number which was associated with it led us to change to a particular provider, which helped us in many areas like mean time to detect and mean time to recover.

Catchpoint helped improve our numbers, and we were successfully able to integrate it with our internal tool, which gave us the right signal to initiate a war room, get the team on the call, and perform a quick troubleshoot and get those fixed as soon as possible. This helped us in many ways, especially our ability to monitor the services of our own application improved compared to waiting for a customer report. We were able to pick up issues much earlier and resolve them much faster.

Catchpoint has positively impacted my organization through detection and remediation. We were successful in getting it implemented internally, and each trigger whenever Catchpoint detected a problem showed an impact. There was no noise associated with it unless a third-party vendor had a problem and our applications were dependent on it. Overall, the improvement in detection and repair significantly improved. Detection was a major point because many applications take their own infrastructure, have their own operations, and have their own monitoring thresholds set up, but Catchpoint plays a good role in terms of detection.

I can share specific outcomes and metrics that improved after using Catchpoint, such as reduced downtime and faster detection. Previously, we were getting customer reports for about four to five incidents out of ten, where approximately 50 percent were customer reports and 50 percent were internally detected. After using Catchpoint, we were close to 90 percent, where out of ten incidents, just one incident came from a customer, and the remaining were detected by internal sources, especially with Catchpoint. This number helped us in terms of reducing downtime. On average, we would take 20 to 25 minutes to fix an issue, but with Catchpoint, we were able to do it within 10 to 12 minutes on average. That time period of downtime reduction of 18 minutes per incident on average helped us in improving our overall numbers associated with both repair time and detection time.

The best features Catchpoint offers include the entire traffic pattern from the source to destination and the hop-by-hop breakdown of all those patterns, including the BGP peers, which was very significant. Catchpoint operates at multiple known locations, and our data centers are in highly used cases. For example, a few data centers we are in are also associated with it, which gives a better and faster response that generates many use cases where we can review more about how Catchpoint can help us in detecting issues. It also performs a ping check every second or every minute based on how the particular service requires it.

Out of those features, the hop-by-hop breakdown of BGP peers is the one that made the biggest difference in my work because I have not seen this feature in others. Other products exist, but this gives very good visualization in the first place, and it also pinpoints exactly the number of milliseconds a particular path takes. By looking at it, on average, if I look at a dashboard we set up, it can give us a better understanding of where we lack and how we can improve. That decision can be much faster compared to where we would have to dig deeper and analyze with a lot of manual effort required. The dashboard visualization gives us a quicker way to justify, take action, and then we actually see the result much faster.

The visualization is also better overall. I have seen in a dashboard it gives me a quick check of where we are, what we are doing, and then how we are doing it, which helps us a lot.

I think Catchpoint can be improved because it is competitively a little costlier. I understand that Catchpoint provides the best solution, but comparatively, if I compare it with Uptrends, New Relic, DataDog, and ThousandEyes, Catchpoint does multiple things, but it comes with a cost. That is one of the areas you can leverage use cases based on customer requirements and come up with a better pricing model. The existing ones are good, but for our use case from Zoom, we were just looking for our endpoints to be monitored every minute, and that cost us a lot compared to the existing tool that we were using. That area is something to look for improvement.

I have been using Catchpoint for close to four years.

Catchpoint is stable.

Catchpoint does a pretty good job in scaling applications drastically. Based on our use case, the migration part, especially onboarding a new application for monitoring, is seamless and does not require a lot of our effort and analysis. It does scale well.

Support was pretty good with Catchpoint. Integration was seamless. We were onboarded to Catchpoint and started testing within a couple of hours. The visualization was good and the UI was also good. In terms of the breakdown of the BGP paths or the traffic from one location to another, the UI was good. The graphical and pictorial representations of all those traffic patterns were pretty highly useful for somebody looking at it for the first time. One of my peers who was also part of the testing got going within a couple of hours, which was much better.

Customer support was good. The initial migration and the initial days of monitoring Catchpoint involved having a dedicated TAM and a dedicated support number that could give us quick answers. All of our questions were answered much faster, and a dedicated document was prepared for reviewing content. Whenever we had a problem, we looked at that document to get those answers. Beyond that, we could call a number to have the support team available for us.

I was not part of the decision regarding why Catchpoint was brought on. I understood the reasoning, but I did not know which other tool they were using. The use case was straightforward: to detect much faster and accurately.

The initial migration and the initial days of monitoring Catchpoint involved having a dedicated TAM and a dedicated support number that could give us quick answers.

Support was pretty good with Catchpoint. Integration was seamless. We were onboarded to Catchpoint and started testing within a couple of hours.

I have seen a return on investment. We definitely saved time by an incident commander who was monitoring the applications. We used to spend at least 30 to 40 minutes on average on a call to detect what the problem was, but that reduced drastically to around 16 to 18 minutes. That time savings has significantly improved our productivity as well as our better monitoring capability. The cost part where each engineer cost comes with the amount of time spent on an incident call or on a ticket, all three factors were included when we looked into Catchpoint.

I was not part of that decision-making regarding pricing, setup cost, and licensing, but as far as I remember, it was pretty good in the early days. I think the cost increased because we were so dependent on Catchpoint for monitoring most of our applications. There was a review check, and after that, I do not remember what the decision was.

We spoke to Uptrends, DataDog, and New Relic before choosing Catchpoint.

I would advise others looking into using Catchpoint to consider that if your use case is more about detecting faster and identifying a root cause, Catchpoint stands as a top contender. It really depends on use cases, especially for someone who has a sensitive application where they want to know every minute if there are transaction failures or login failures. Catchpoint can help you in those areas. I rate Catchpoint highly for organizations with these requirements.

Hybrid Cloud

Amazon Web Services (AWS)

My main use case for Catchpoint is to check website availability in different regions so that we can be aware of any downtimes.

A specific example of how I have used Catchpoint to check website availability is when we check DNS propagation. We analyze how it is working and which locations it has propagated because sometimes clients reach out to us that a website is not available in a certain location, which could be due to DNS propagation. Catchpoint helps with those pain points, and we also use it to monitor when a website struggles on the CDN.

In my opinion, one of the best features Catchpoint offers is the detailed alerting, which not only points out outages but also provides a lot of information in the alerts.

I find the alerting details helpful because, working for hosting organizations, it is tough to identify issues due to third-party providers, such as a CDN. The alerts contain all the details, such as when a website is failing to load due to a CDN issue, such as a 503 error at the CDN.

I think Catchpoint helps us detect issues before anybody could report them, which can impact clients because it provides prior monitoring that also sees outside the infrastructure, meaning outside the backend.

Catchpoint positively impacts our organization by helping us build customer trust, as customers do not care if the issue comes from the backend or our infrastructure. It allows us to determine issues that are not related to our services, which builds good trust with customers, and they know we are working on downtimes.

I believe Catchpoint's accuracy and reliability of output is impressive because it finds issues before anyone else does. Even if a website viewer identifies a problem, Catchpoint has good global coverage on outages and checks application statuses continuously, reporting them immediately.

Catchpoint has good scalability and is stable.

Catchpoint is very great software for troubleshooting APIs, websites, availability, and other third-party services such as CDNs, which makes it stand out.

I think Catchpoint should have licensing models for individuals or very small organizations, and there is no auto-tuning for alerts, so auto-tuning features for alerts would be beneficial.

I have been using Catchpoint for around two years.

Catchpoint is stable.

Catchpoint has good scalability and is stable.

I have not interacted with customer support. I read the documentation for monitoring details instead.

I did not previously use a different solution.

My experience with pricing, setup costs, and licensing is that you just need to buy the licenses, and the team sends you the license keys, which is pretty easy. I am not sure about cost-effectiveness because that was decided by the organization, as I was the monitoring person.

I believe we see a good return on investment with Catchpoint because you only need one or two people to monitor, so you do not need a larger team. This way, the license count is also reduced, and you build customer trust, which we market as a feature; that is what our organization did, indicating a positive ROI.

My experience with pricing, setup costs, and licensing is that you just need to buy the licenses, and the team sends you the license keys, which is pretty easy. I am not sure about cost-effectiveness because that was decided by the organization, as I was the monitoring person.

I did not evaluate other options before choosing Catchpoint.

My advice to others looking into using Catchpoint is that if they need to check third-party services, they should consider buying it. Otherwise, if it is related to the infrastructure, they may not need to consider it, but it is pretty reliable for other services. I would rate this review a 9.

Public Cloud

Amazon Web Services (AWS)

What do you like best about the product?

The multitude o7 tests is great, but not enough nodes in all locations

What do you dislike about the product?

No RBM options, or at least not enough for all locations

What problems is the product solving and how is that benefiting you?

Before and after monitoring of performance for new products is very helpful

What do you like best about the product?

Synthetic transaction testing allows for regular monitoring of the user experience. If any issues arise, the tool also offers the ability to capture screengrabs, which can serve as evidence for further investigation.

What do you dislike about the product?

Capturing the execution time for each step still needs improvement. I expect this will be addressed in an upcoming release.

What problems is the product solving and how is that benefiting you?

Reliable user experience monitoring across different geo locations is very helpful in identifying any region specific degradations before it spreads further.

What do you like best about the product?

I find Catchpoint incredibly useful for its ability to monitor application use cases effectively. It provides end-to-end functional test cases in the production environment, which is crucial for detecting issues quickly before they are reported by customers. This feature is particularly valuable in maintaining a reliable production environment and ensuring that potential failures are caught proactively, thereby enhancing operational reliability and customer satisfaction.

What do you dislike about the product?

Sometimes, Catchpoint provides false alerts indicating failures in test cases. However, upon manual verification, these alerts often turn out to be incorrect, as the test cases work fine.

What problems is the product solving and how is that benefiting you?

I use Catchpoint for monitoring application use cases, which helps catch functional issues in production swiftly, preventing customer impact.

What do you like best about the product?

it help me with good internet speed and help me to work faster as it work faster it improve my performance and availability

What do you dislike about the product?

As of now there is no such to dislike about Catchpoint

What problems is the product solving and how is that benefiting you?

it help me to find issue in network tell us about problem and give us alert so that we can resolve it as soon as possible. improve uptime and it help us to spend less time on resolving the issue

What do you like best about the product?

I like Catchpoint because it gives me real-time visibility into performance, it is very easy to spot the issues. The most helpful part is how quickly it alerts us about slow response time or downtime. It saves me a lot of manual checking, and the support team is very quick and helpful.

What do you dislike about the product?

Sometimes the setup feels a little bit complex at the beginning and also it takes time to fully explore all the features. Setup takes some effort but runs smoothly after some time. Apart from that rest of the things are easy to understand.

What problems is the product solving and how is that benefiting you?

Catchpoint helps us to detect downtime and performance issues early as compared to other applications. So, it saves our troubleshooting time and improve the reliability and also ensures the smoother digital user experience.

What do you like best about the product?

The best part about Catchpoint for me is the detailed diagnostics it provides. Instead of just telling me something is wrong, it helps me understand why it’s wrong—whether it’s DNS, routing, or application latency. This really reduces the time my team spends on troubleshooting and helps us resolve incidents faster.

What do you dislike about the product?

The only thing I dislike is that Catchpoint has so many features that it takes some time to fully learn and configure. Once you get used to it, though, it becomes very powerful

What problems is the product solving and how is that benefiting you?

As a network engineer, Catchpoint helps me identify and resolve performance issues much faster. It gives visibility not just into our internal applications, but also into external dependencies like DNS, BGP, and CDN providers. Before using it, it was difficult to prove whether a slowdown was caused by our network or by an external service. Now, with Catchpoint’s global vantage points and path analysis, I can quickly see where the problem lies.

What do you like best about the product?

The reliability it offers in monitoring applications realtime.
Along with that it offers wide range of setup for alerting mechanisms and representation of logs for analysis.

What do you dislike about the product?

The tool becomes quite slow with integration built up.
Takes quite sometime to load and process logs when you have thousands of application level logs generating every minute.

What problems is the product solving and how is that benefiting you?

Catchpoint allows us to debug application level logs whenever any integration fails.
This helps in performing fixes specially during deployment of new features while testing.

What do you like best about the product?

Using catch point to monitor our digital infrastructure and it has significantly improved how we detect and resolve performance issues.

What do you dislike about the product?

Pricing isn’t as transferent or flexible as smaller teams might like

What problems is the product solving and how is that benefiting you?

WebPageTest integration gives us deep visibility