Introducing Catchpoint Session Replay: See Digital Experience Through Your Users’ Eyes

When was the last time you really saw what your customers experience on your site? We're excited to introduce Session Replay, a new capability in our Internet Performance Monitoring (IPM) platform that lets you step directly into the user's journey. Now available to all Catchpoint customers as part of their WebPageTest Expert Plan Expert plan, with mobile support coming soon. Session Replay is so much more than a platform upgrade. It’s an opportunity to understand, fix, and even prevent the issues that lead to churn, missed conversions, and frustrated users, all from their point of view.

What is Session Replay?

Session Replay recreates the real actions a user takes on your site or application — every click, scroll, tap, and interaction. It offers a playback of each session, but with extra layers of detail and privacy. This isn’t just traditional analytics or aggregate data. It’s seeing the journey, capturing what users experienced during their sessions:

• Watch how a visitor completes checkout (or doesn’t)

• See which menus, pop-ups, or forms caused hesitation or mistakes

• Understand exactly where frustration sets in, before it impacts your business

It works by logging every meaningful action and page change, then reconstructing the session so you can review, empathize, and act.

What Session Replay isn't

It's important to understand what session replay is not to address common misconceptions:  

• Not a video recorder: It reconstructs ONLY what happens within your app or website. No personal screens, no background notifications.

• Not Big Brother: Sensitive fields are masked, and you control what’s collected and re-played.

• Not real-time surveillance: Playbacks happen after the session, helping you learn and improve without constant watching.

• Not a tool to replace other analytics or testing: Session Replay complements your existing data, adding “why” and “how” to the “what.”

What can you actually do with Session Replay?

Session replay provides value across multiple dimensions of digital experience optimization:  

• The frustrated shopper: A customer tries to add an item to their cart but encounters a problem—the button isn’t responding. With Session Replay, teams can review this session, identify where the process failed, and fix the issue to help prevent similar customer drop-offs in the future.

• The confused user: Support requests increase after you deploy a new form. Rather than relying on customer descriptions or screenshots, Session Replay enables your support team to step through actual user sessions, see what happened, and provide specific feedback to address confusion and improve support outcomes.

• The product manager’s challenge: Looking over conversion rates on mobile, you notice fewer sign-ups than expected. Session Replay reveals users scrolling past a key call-to-action that’s not visible on smaller screens. With these insights, you can make targeted design updates and help users complete their journeys more easily.

• Diagnosing performance: Your engineers receive reports of slow page loads from a particular city or network. Using Session Replay, they can examine affected sessions, correlate user navigation with network and performance data, and pinpoint exactly where delays are occurring—making it easier to deliver improvements that matter to users.

Session Replay use cases and who it's for

Session Replay is helpful for anyone who wants to turn real user journeys into actionable insight and meaningful improvements.

• Developers and SREs: Use Session Replay to trace user journeys, spot where things go wrong, and test fixes using real interactions, not just simulated ones.

• Support teams: Review the actual steps a user took before submitting a ticket. This makes it easier to resolve issues accurately.

• Product and UX teams: See the specific actions users take, which helps you make design or workflow changes based on direct evidence—not assumptions.

• Marketing teams: Analyze what helps users convert (or drop off), using actual user experiences to refine campaigns and journeys.

• QA teams: Check that features work for real users after launch, supplementing test cases with insights from real-world usage.

What makes Catchpoint’s Session Replay different?

Here are three ways Catchpoint’s Session Replay stands apart:

#1 Native IPM Platform Integration

Unlike fragmented solutions that require multiple tools, Catchpoint delivers session replay natively within our IPM platform alongside Real User Monitoring (RUM), advanced synthetics, BGP monitoring, and distributed tracing. Combined with insights from our 3000+ Global Agent Network, this provides a single consolidated solution for end-to-end digital experience management, eliminating tool sprawl and operational complexity.  

#2 Deep context

Catchpoint's unique advantage lies in correlating session replays directly with performance waterfalls, network timings, and resource loading data. This context-rich debugging approach allows teams to see not just what users did, but how performance and network conditions affected their experience.

#3 Enterprise-Grade Privacy and Security

Built with privacy-first design, Catchpoint's Session Replay includes sensitive data masking to ensure compliance and security. The platform offers flexible deployment options with per-app enablement and smart sampling, allowing organizations to balance insight gathering with data governance requirements.

Getting started

Session Replay is available now for all Catchpoint customers on the WebPageTest Expert plan. The capability integrates directly into the Catchpoint IPM platform, providing access to session recordings alongside existing synthetic monitoring, RUM data, and performance analytics. This new capability represents a significant advancement in Catchpoint's mission to provide complete visibility into the Internet Stack, helping organizations detect and resolve user experience issues before they impact customer satisfaction, revenue, and brand reputation.

Ready to see digital experience through your users’ eyes? Explore our interactive tours

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