Catchpoint Ushers In A New Era Of Visibility With The Addition Of 5G Mobile Edge Nodes

Our continual investment into our observer infrastructure has paved the way for the most accurate active monitoring telemetry data in the industry today. Other vendors mimic digital experience observability by offering basic active monitoring from just a few cloud-based locations. This partial coverage offers the appearance of full stack status. In reality, however, that designation is inaccurate. Today’s businesses depend on more than just cloud-based systems. Without visibility into those systems, it‘s easy to miss issues and difficult to fix them when they happen.

At Catchpoint, we have always advocated for the use of best-of-breed solutions. That’s why we offer a range of powerful integrations with popular DevOps tools. It’s also precisely why we are excited to announce our latest solution: the ground-breaking AWS Wavelength edge integration.

A Paradigm Shift in Application Delivery

Network edge computing can significantly lower latency. How? By reducing the distance that data must travel and decreasing the number of hops it must jump across. This results in faster processing and the ability to conserve bandwidth.

For applications requiring low latency, sending huge quantities of data to and from a centralized datacenter is not a scalable option. Data processing and management must take place closer to end user applications. Mobile edge cloud moves application processing, storage, and management to the radio access network’s edge. In addition, it enables data localization for security and privacy reasons.

The potential for AWS Wavelength  

AWS Wavelength is a hybrid cloud offering optimized for mobile edge computing applications. It embeds AWS compute and storage services in the datacenters of communications service providers (e.g., KDDI, Verizon, Vodafone) at the edge of the 5G network.  

AWS Wavelength doesn’t replace the traditional cloud. Instead, it keeps the parts of the application that need to be closer to users. This avoids the data having to travel between the centralized datacenter and the application.  

Catchpoint observers at the edge

Catchpoint observers are now available across the AWS Wavelength edge infrastructure. Those observers are ready for Catchpoint users to run tests from. As such, they represent the industry’s first 5G mobile edge data sources for observing next-generation low latency workloads. The benefit to you: actionable insights enabling you to benchmark and evaluate edge cloud providers who can fulfill your cloud infrastructure needs.

Announcing industry-first edge node locations and carriers

The Catchpoint nodes are available in the following AWS Wavelength locations:

Just as our Backbone observers monitor from the ISP edge (without the wireline last mile), our Wavelength observers will monitor from the mobile carrier edge (without the cellular radio last mile). The Wavelength observers will enable Catchpoint customers to understand end user experience from mobile 5G network edge on multiple carriers and in multiple locations, without the over-the-air variability that mobile devices experience.

Active tests can be run from Wavelength locations to other services and applications across the Internet as a way of monitoring performance at edge sites, such as multi-cloud and hybrid cloud testing.

Applicable observability use cases at the edge:

• 5G End-User Experience: Observe and baseline the digital experience observed by end users on mobile 5G networks, without the variability of the RAN last mile. This can include human users accessing web-based services from their 5G devices or IoT devices connected over the 5G network. Testing from these observers provides consistent performance measurements. This is particularly useful for baselining and alerting.
• ‍Edge Application Experience: Companies are increasingly deploying applications in network edge zones to reduce latency to their end users in these areas. Most of these applications still need to connect to other services and applications across the Internet. For this use case, active testing from Wavelength nodes will monitor the performance experienced by the applications hosted in the specified Wavelength locations.  
• ‍Edge Benchmarking: Companies that buy and sell edge compute solutions often want to evaluate network performance at competing edge locations for benchmarking purposes. Buyers want to know if the performance improvement is worth the investment. Sellers want to know how they stand up to the competition.

‍How to build a robust observability strategy all the way to the edge

The success of your active observability strategy must include testing, measuring, validating, modeling, and monitoring using trusted data that is measured in the right way, from the right place.

A robust strategy should begin with defining your objectives. Determine what to monitor and where to observe from, based on the identified objectives. If you want to truly understand end user digital experience, be sure that you monitor the entire service delivery chain through which traffic travels: backbone, broadband, last mile, mobile, enterprise, and now edge locations.

Additional resources

"Monitoring at the edge of the third act of the Internet" By Mehdi Daoudi, Co-founder and CEO, Catchpoint

"Catchpoint's CEO: Edge performance is not a commodity" By Mehdi Daoudi, Co-founder and CEO, Catchpoint

"Three ways Catchpoint monitors the edge" By Navya Dwarakanath, formerly Senior Sales Engineer, Catchpoint