Retail digital performance event recap: Key insights from IBM & Catchpoint

In March 2025, Catchpoint partnered with IBM to host the first Retail Digital Performance event in New York City. The sessions delivered practical, thought-provoking insights on speed, resilience, and user-centric design, giving attendees fresh strategies to improve digital experiences at scale.

Speaker highlights

The event brought together industry experts from IBM, Catchpoint, and Beyond.com. Here's what stood out.

Catchpoint's Gerardo Dada shared insights on why organizations need to rethink monitoring in the modern cloud era, and how Internet Performance Monitoring helps ensure that performance issues don't disrupt user experiences.

Catchpoint's Gerardo Dada

Terry Bernstein, Lead Product Manager of IBM NS1, discussed the critical role of speed and how selecting the right DNS vendor directly impacts business performance.

IBM NS1's Terry Bernstein

Ben Ball, Product Marketing of IBM, hosted the event and shared how IBM NS1 played a key role in supporting "The Big Game," ensuring seamless performance across all streams despite challenges in the digital delivery chain.

IBM's Ben Ball

Sergey Katsev, VP of Engineering at Catchpoint, delivered an insightful joint demo. He showed how synthetic monitoring data, powered by the world's largest intelligent agent network, enhances IBM NS1 Pulsar to optimize traffic steering at a micro-regional level and continually improve user experience.

Catchpoint's Sergey Katsev

Fireside chat: real-world lessons from Beyond.com

The standout session was a fireside chat between Beyond.com's Tim Mohlman and Catchpoint General Manager and Co-Founder Mehdi Daoudi. Tim shared how Internet Performance Monitoring helps his team optimize digital experiences for every user, including those on older hardware or slower connections.

For IT teams responsible for e-commerce performance, Tim's perspective highlights exactly why visibility into the full Internet path matters. When your revenue depends on every page load, every checkout flow, and every third-party integration, you can't afford blind spots between your data center and your customer's browser. That's the problem Internet Performance Monitoring solves, and it's why LogicMonitor has made it a core layer of its Autonomous IT platform alongside LM Envision and Edwin AI.

Beyond.com's Tim Mohlman and Catchpoint CEO Mehdi Daoudi

Below is an edited transcript of the conversation.

What's a moment where monitoring tools saved the day?

Tim Mohlman: A few years back, we had weird DNS issues, sporadic slowdowns, customers complaining, but our status page said everything was "healthy." We were using Dyn DNS and Akamai, but we couldn't pin down the problem.

Then Catchpoint engineers stepped in. They set up custom tests and found a Level 10 DNS problem: a CNAME record tied to outdated Akamai PoPs. They handed us a screenshot with the smoking gun. Two days later, it was fixed. That moment taught us: If a human spots an issue before your monitoring does, you've failed.

How do you balance proactive monitoring with avoiding "alert fatigue"?

Tim: You have to monitor like you're the customer. Don't just check if the site's "up." Ask:

• Is the page blank?
• Are ads blocking content?
• Can users actually check out?

We're aggressive. We'd rather dial back alerts later than miss a critical failure. For example, we monitor every step of the e-commerce journey: search, cart, checkout, tax calculations. If 25% of customers can't complete a purchase, that's a revenue emergency, not just a "tech issue."

How do you handle third-party failures?

Tim: You design for resilience. A fiber line was cut in Chicago once. Our Salt Lake data center looked fine, but East Coast revenue tanked. Now, we:

• Use circuit breakers to fail fast (for example, silently drop broken product searches).
• Monitor globally, not just from our data center's backyard.
• Pressure-test third parties. If Google Tag Manager crashes, can customers still check out?

The goal is to fail gracefully.

How do you convince stakeholders to invest in monitoring?

Tim: You tie it to revenue. Finance once asked, "Why monitor Akamai? We can't fix it anyway." I replied: If a highway to your store is blocked, you find a detour, or you lose sales.

We also share Catchpoint dashboards with execs. When they see a red line dip alongside revenue, it clicks. Data tells the story better than any pitch.

What's the biggest cultural hurdle?

Tim: Silos. Teams used to pick their own monitoring tools (New Relic, Datadog, Catchpoint). During outages, nobody spoke the same language.

Now we push OpenTelemetry for vendor-agnostic data. Our first question to vendors: "Are you OpenTelemetry-compliant?" If not, we walk. Standardization lets us correlate data across tools and avoid "my dashboard says everything's fine" arguments.

Any final advice for teams starting fresh?

Tim: Treat monitoring like a customer journey. My wife shops our site. If she hits a bug, I hear about it at dinner. Test real workflows, not just uptime.

And automate. We once got sued because a manual report failed when its owner was hospitalized. If it's critical, never rely on one person.

Mehdi: Thanks, Tim. Any parting thoughts?

Tim: Speed is the foundation of trust. If your site's slow, customers will buy from a competitor, even if their prices are higher.

Networking and what comes next

The networking dinner brought together attendees from Box, Costco, Beyond, IBM, Catchpoint, and more for an evening of conversation, good food, and shared insights from the day.

A big thank you to all the attendees, speakers, and organizers who made this event a success.

Events like this reinforce a core idea: when you combine deep Internet visibility with infrastructure monitoring and AI-driven intelligence, you give IT teams the context they need to protect digital experiences at scale.