Synthetic Monitoring is a methodology of actively probing servers, services, and applications by simulating an end user. Blackbox, aka Active, aka Proactive, aka Synthetic methodology emulates an action and performs a functional test without really worrying about the internal inner workings, very much like an end user (“I am here…
Today’s business landscape is increasingly competitive, demanding that companies maintain an agile mindset when differentiating their products and services from competing brands. For many organizations, this differentiation comes in the form of better user engagement strategies designed to improve the availability and reliability of web services and applications. But while…
DevOps is a practice that helps teams continuously create, refine, and improve. DevOps and site reliability engineering (SRE) teams must constantly hone and enhance the systems and software they are responsible for. This includes taking a clear-eyed and honest look at how technology and culture choices impact their practice. Teams…
Recently, I was visiting a large media company who, a short time ago, moved their entire infrastructure to Google Cloud. The dev team were pushing for an APM solution and were looking at all the usual suspects: Dynatrace, AppD, New Relic, Datadog… all great choices! The discussion that followed is…
While catching up on emails this weekend, I ran into a problem—a link in one of the messages ruined my Sunday and almost ruined my professional reputation. I clicked on the link. Nothing. Refreshed the page. Nothing. Tried a different browser. No joy. Changed my ISP. Nothing. Changed DNS providers.…
In 2013 after a debate with a CMO I wrote this blog post where I made the case that Performance was the 5th P of the modern marketing mix and IT telemetry is not just for IT. Fast forward six years, it is clear that the performance of a web…
CenturyLink Outage 911: UPDATE Dec 28, 2018 The CenturyLink outage affected 911 services in Washington state, Missouri, Idaho, and Arizona. People report receiving busy dial tones when trying to call 911. CenturyLink tweeted about “additional technical problems” around 6:30 a.m. EST. Residents of these areas also report receiving mobile phone alerts about…
Did you know the SaaS (software as a service) model has been around since the 1960s? Back when computers were the size of conference rooms and cost over a million dollars—it was easier for companies to rent computer systems from providers. And so, SaaS was born. I cut my teeth…
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…
