As we celebrated our 10th birthday last week, we received a surprise present. Gartner has named Catchpoint a Cool Vendor for Performance Analysis: Analytics and Containers. Sometimes we get the question “Why isn’t Catchpoint on the APM Magic Quadrant?” The short answer is we are not an APM vendor. The…
When we started Catchpoint ten years ago, the cloud was just emerging. Google and Amazon were using their own cloud infrastructure. 2008 was all about Virtualization, the first step towards abstracting the physical layer. Yet, there wasn’t a lot of discussion of how all of this change was impacting the…
Technology teams are not immune to hype and trends. Today one of the hottest topics is Observability. Everyone seems to be jumping on the observability bandwagon. Companies are building observability teams and looking to purchase observability tools. Observability isn’t necessarily a new thing. Having spent two decades building, monitoring, and…
I love the Internet! I love it so much it became the cornerstone of Catchpoint’s vision to help the Internet deliver on its potential for everyone. A few weeks ago, I attended a lecture by Professor Rawi Abdelal from Harvard Business School where he spoke about the rise of physical…
No, we are not launching a new James Bond movie. We are talking about the messaging app Telegram, founded by a Russian, which was ironically blocked by Russian authorities over its non-compliance with the government security measures. The internet superhighway is not without roadblocks. Censorship has always been a hot…
I have always been a huge fan of external DNS resolvers such as OpenDNS and Google Public DNS resolvers. I truly believe that they do improve the online customer experience since most ISPs do either a poor job at managing theirs DNS or they do DNS rewrites. Cloudflare recently launched…
There are many factors involved in designing and deploying a sound monitoring strategy; monitoring solutions can help you execute that strategy. Making sure they provide the metrics and insight you need to detect and help you identify issues before there is a business impact is critical (in the industry, we call…
This is the last blog in the series on sampling. In the previous editions (Part I, Part IIa, and Part IIb), we had (a) provided an overview of the metrics arms race and had walked through the use of sampling in this regard, (b) overviewed margin of error associated with…
In an earlier blog, the evolution of performance metrics – for example, from load time to above the fold to speed index – was discussed. As much as this evolution is warranted in the wake of the dynamic application landscape and changing user expectations, the phenomenon also contributes to the…
It’s a Saturday afternoon: An email from a customer drove me to start troubleshooting an issue they were experiencing with Amazon S3. They were experiencing random high wait time, usually an indication of a problem with communication back to some sort of an origin system. Should’ve been a piece of…
