Blog Post

Improving Performance and Visibility Through Managed Monitoring

Learn how Catchpoint's Managed Monitoring Service enhances performance and visibility with an award-winning, dedicated team of pros.

We officially launched Catchpoint Managed Monitoring Services in April 2019—a launch that was three years in the making.

Catchpoint, as we all know, is a comprehensive Digital Experience Monitoring company with the largest number of monitoring nodes (or PoPs) across the world. Hundreds of enterprises around the globe leverage our products and features to manage their end user experience proactively.

Different teams throughout organizations use Catchpoint to solve a wide variety of problems:

  1. IT Infrastructure monitoring teams use Catchpoint for 24/7 monitoring of all their digital applications
  2. DevOps teams use Catchpoint for testing and monitoring during the entire SDLC
  3. Network teams use Catchpoint for monitoring the health of their global Ingress and Egress traffic
  4. Marketing teams use Catchpoint for Benchmarking and Competitive analysis
  5. Business teams (Finance, Procurement, etc.) leverage Catchpoint to ensure they are meeting the SLAs of their customers
  6. Engineering teams use Catchpoint for Performance Studies, A/B testing, etc.
  7. Executives use Catchpoint’s dashboard and reports for a high-level view of their KPIs and end users’ experiences

While most organizations have dedicated teams specializing in their respective areas, there are several organizations still going through digital transformation—and end user experience is not something they specialize in.

The illustration below describes how monitoring teams prioritized their focus in the traditional technology era—end user monitoring was the last priority.

old monitoring approach

However, with the transformation in technology and with the way content is hosted and delivered to end users, traditional monitoring approaches leave blind spots. This calls for new methodology, where the end users are the primary focus:

digital experience monitoring

This new way requires organizations and teams to put themselves in the shoes of the end users and look at everything from their perspective. While great code and a healthy network is still important, understanding how all these siloed functions work together is what Digital Experience Monitoring is all about.

For example, one of our Managed Monitoring Customers is one of the largest Fintech companies in the world—with a massive IT organization. During a recent incident, the SRE, IT Ops, and Performance Engineering teams were all pulled in to solve one major problem.

The company was venturing into several emerging markets like Brazil, India, and Africa. Their users and partners were complaining of poor user experience, and the site was suffering from very high bounce rate. Yet all their internal monitoring signals – application performance, database, network, servers – were well within their thresholds and looked green.

This is when they turned to Catchpoint’s Managed Monitoring Services team so that they could truly understand their end user experience, get to the root cause of the issue, and resolve the problem (which also had the attention of their CTO).

Any engagement with our managed monitoring team starts with a consultation with the MMSP team. This is the kickoff meeting where we learn our customer’s goals. Goals could be anything from implementing a solid digital experience monitoring strategy to solving an immediate problem like the scenario above. This helps us prioritize the focus areas and enables the customer to gain maximum ROI as soon as possible.

The next part of the consultation phase is the understanding of the digital delivery architecture—details like:

  • Where are they hosted: on-premise, cloud, multi-cloud?
  • Which DNS provider do they use: self-hosted, single, or multiple managed DNS providers?
  • Do they use any balancers?
  • Do they use any CDN or multi-CDN providers?
  • Which type of CDN services do they use?
  • Which parts of the application leverages which CDN service?
  • The nature of the applications: MPA, SPA, PWA etc.
  • Do they use any cloud security services?
  • Do they use any third-party services: AB Testing, Tag management, CMS, APIs etc.?

All the above info helps us define the ideal monitoring strategy for that customer. Designing and implementing this strategy takes into account things such as:

  • What end points should be monitored?
  • Which pages should be monitored individually or as transactions to simulate a user journey?
  • How frequently should the end points be monitored to achieve the desired MTTD?
  • Which locations or vantage points should the test be monitored from?
  • Which tests types should be utilized – Browser tests, Traceroutes, DNS tests etc.?
  • What type of custom metrics should be captured: CDN pragma headers, server-side metrics, etc.?
  • Which metrics are relevant for the application being monitored?
  • What types of alert configurations should be used?
  • Which types of Dashboards are relevant to the organization or each team involved?

After the initial consultation and strategy planning, we start with the engagement stage. This stage involves 4 pillars:

managed monitoring pillars

Set-Up & Maintenance

  1. Set up involves the first implementation of the entire monitoring strategy.
  2. Maintenance involves additions and changes to the monitoring strategy anytime during the monitoring period. Maintaining your test scripts is a critical (if often tedious) part of any monitoring initiative, as failure to do so can create a snowball effect that will eventually render all your efforts useless.

managed monitoring scripts alerts dashboard reports

Alerts Triage

This service gives customers a 24/7/365 monitoring team responsible for triaging alerts and diagnosing the root cause of any incident. Essentially, Catchpoint’s team of experts can do all of the heavy lifting when it comes to alerting and diagnosis, lowering your mean time to detect (MTTD) and mean time to repair (MTTR) – ultimately preventing outages and shortening any that do arise.

managed monitoring alerts

Below is a real example of the 24/7 Managed Monitoring team in action.

  1. Detecting problem
  2. Root cause analysis
  3. Escalating to customer contacts
  4. Working with customer and vendor
  5. Getting the problem resolved

catchpoint managed monitoring 1

catchpoint managed monitoring 2

catchpoint managed monitoring 3

Trend Analysis

Catchpoint’s Performance Analysis leverages experts who understand your data and unique needs to provide visibility into performance bottlenecks and ensure high-performing IT operations. When the success of your organization depends on how your web applications perform, you need to be one hundred percent sure of their reliability, scalability, and usability.

With flexible setup and scheduling options, these custom reports deliver the level of information you need—when you need it—to be confident that your applications are delivering amazing customer experiences.

It includes:

  • Intensive analysis of performance trends over time
  • Deep-dive comprehensive reports that provide you with granular insights and recommendations for web optimization, including detailed explorations of a spectrum of components such as DNS, Network, CDN, web page structure, ISP, etc.
  • Competitive analysis that compares your performance to the best in the industry to help you stay ahead of your peers

managed monitoring trends analysis 1

managed monitoring trends analysis 2

Key Takeaways

With 24/7 monitoring team that is made up of experts who work with several enterprises across the globe, Catchpoint Managed Monitoring Services is for anyone who needs help with:

  • Defining and managing their Digital Experience Monitoring Strategy
  • Reducing their MTTD and MTTR immediately
  • 24/7 test management; building and managing complex scripts
  • Centralizing their monitoring efforts and collaborating with multiple internal teams

To learn more about Managed Monitoring or to sign up for a free consultation, click here.

Synthetic Monitoring
Real User Monitoring
Network Reachability
DNS
CDN
API Monitoring
SRE
DevOps
ITOps
Cloud Migration
SLA Management
Workforce Experience
Financial Services
Media and Entertainment
Enterprise
This is some text inside of a div block.

You might also like

Blog post

Traceroute InSession: A traceroute tool for modern networks

Blog post

The cost of inaction: A CIO’s primer on why investing in Internet Performance Monitoring can’t wait

Blog post

Mastering IPM: Key Takeaways from our Best Practices Series