Internet Sonar: A Game-Changer for Incident Detection

When outages cost you tens of thousands of dollars each minute, pinpointing the source of disruptions as quickly as possible becomes mission-critical. This is not a time for finger-pointing and hastily assembled war rooms searching for that needle in the haystack. You need simple, intelligent, trustworthy Internet health information to expedite your incident detection.  

What if you could access this crucial information at a glance without you or your teams having to do all the grunt work of sourcing it manually? That’s the core concept behind the latest innovation Catchpoint’s added to our IPM platform: Internet Sonar. This groundbreaking tool aims to revolutionize how you respond to outages, ensuring your services remain resilient and reliable.  

Introducing Internet Sonar

The first question your IT Team asks whenever there’s any service disruption is, “Is it us or something else?” Catchpoint's Internet Sonar answers that question intelligently by providing real-time, global Internet health insights at a glance. Internet Sonar uses data from the world’s largest, independent, active observability network to monitor hundreds of the Internet’s most popular services for outages. The result is an AI-powered, real-time, interactive status report that can be displayed via an interactive map, a dashboard widget, or accessed by any system via API.  

Leveraging Internet Sonar, you’ll know whenever a third party has an outage, where they have it, how long it's been going on, and whether or not it's likely to affect you. No finger-pointing, no war rooms, just straightforward, intelligent, and reliable Internet health information so you can get ahead of productivity or experience-impacting 3rd-party incidents.  

What sets Internet Sonar apart: Four essential aspects  

1. Catchpoint’s Global Observability Network
   Internet Sonar's effectiveness begins with Catchpoint's industry-leading Global Observability Network. With over 2,500 vantage points spanning more than 300 providers across 80 countries—and this network continues to grow—we maintain continuous testing. With more "eyes" monitoring the global Internet than any other solution, our data fidelity and accuracy are unmatched. This wealth of data is the foundation for the real-time maps presented by Internet Sonar, offering precise insights into third-party entities impacting your business.  

2. Your critical Internet services covered
   Internet Sonar actively monitors some of the most crucial Internet services, including Content Delivery Networks (CDNs), Domain Name Systems (DNS), various cloud protocols, and SaaS services like Salesforce, among others. If any of them encounters an issue in a specific region, you’ll know with Internet Sonar, enabling you to react proactively. You have the flexibility to monitor specific categories and regions of your choosing. Internet Sonar adapts to your preferences, whether you're interested in a global overview or detailed insights into particular areas.  

3. Real-time alerts and integration
   One of Catchpoint’s key differentiators is not only the breadth and depth of our visibility but also how we deliver insights. Internet Sonar provides real-time alerts that you can seamlessly integrate into your existing tools and workflows. This isn't limited to email alerts; we offer webhook and API integration capabilities, ensuring you receive critical information through the tools you already use.  

4. AI-powered data correlation
   Internet Sonar harnesses AI to deliver valuable insights and actionable information, not just raw data. We use advanced AI techniques to automatically correlate the results of continuous testing, which happens hundreds of millions of times each day. This means that the data you receive is processed and converted into clear, real-time status information that is easy to understand.  

Unlocking Business Value: Three advantages of Internet Sonar  

1. Rapid incident detection: Internet Sonar offers immediate operational visibility, simplifying pinpointing the root cause and determining whether the issue resides within your organization or with a third party. This reduces your MTTR (Mean Time To Resolution) and nearly eliminates time-consuming and costly war rooms. If you can answer in 10 seconds whether or not it's you or a third party, you’ll save a significant amount of time and money.  

2. Simplified operations: Given the challenge and expenses associated with talent, Internet Sonar provides you access to curated Internet health data without you or your teams having to do all the grunge work of maintaining that manually. Not only does it help simplify your operations, it also unlocks significant cost savings. You’ll allocate resources more strategically and focus on activities that drive value for your business.  

3. Governance, compliance, and risk management: When you have money on the line, you need independent, trustworthy data. Internet Sonar serves as a valuable ally, offering a comprehensive solution for managing global Internet dependencies with reliable and independent data.  

Not just another too-little, too-late tool

Internet Sonar doesn’t just tell you when a site is down after people tweet about it. It provides real-time outage detection and visualization, showing which third parties and services are not playing well. It tells you why a particular part of the world or a specific part of the internet is having a problem – in real-time. Moreover, we monitor from the end-user perspective, rather than the cloud. This means that even if a competing product believes everything is functioning smoothly, their solution may still be unreachable from certain parts of the globe due to issues with third-party services.

‍Internet Sonar in action  

Don’t just take our word for it. Here's what a Technical Architect from the Washington Post said about Internet Sonar: "Here at The Washington Post, we recently had a situation where several alerts were firing. We couldn't pinpoint root cause, and our cloud provider's status was all green. After troubleshooting for nearly thirty minutes, we determined that the issue was with another critical service provider on which we rely. If Internet Sonar had been in place, it would have proactively flagged the outage and helped us discover root cause much more rapidly."  

“I am particularly excited about Catchpoint’s Internet Sonar because it offers a uniquely cost-effective way for IT teams to radically reduce MTTR by determining whether an issue is due to an issue in their Internet Stack or something else happening in the Internet,” said Mehdi Daoudi, CEO of Catchpoint. “With outages costing up to tens of thousands of dollars per minute, our customers will be able to save millions with this at-a-glance information.”

Check out our demo hub to see Internet Sonar at work, or contact us to learn more.