The Power of Over 3000 Intelligent Observability Agents

Catchpoint has officially crossed a major milestone: over 3,000 intelligent agents now power our Global Agent Network.

This isn’t just a big number. It underscores our commitment to helping our users monitor what matters, from where it matters most: the end user. With agents deployed across 105 countries, 346 cities, and every layer of the Internet stack, Catchpoint now offers the broadest and deepest visibility into user experience available today.

The problem with traditional monitoring  

Imagine trying to understand website performance by only monitoring your servers. You'd miss critical issues arising from network congestion in specific regions, problems with local ISPs, or even how your application performs on different devices worldwide.

If you only get information from your own datacenters or a few cloud-based locations, you’re missing critical insights into the actual experience your system delivers to users—whether they’re customers, employees, or systems connecting via an API.

It’s like the old joke: A drunk is searching under a streetlamp for his keys. A cop asks, “Is this where you lost them?” “No,” the drunk replies, pointing away. “Then why are you looking here?” the cop asks. “Because the light’s better here.”

That’s what monitoring only from your datacenter or a few cloud regions is like. You're not seeing what users actually experience out in the real world.

Monitoring from where it matters  

Understanding digital experience and being able to see anything across the Internet that is impacting it, requires a network of intelligent agents that monitor from the actual locations where your users reside plus agents in key locations of the Internet backbone. This "outside-in" perspective delivers invaluable insights into:

• True end-user experience: Understand latency, availability, and functionality as your users perceive it.

• Geographic performance variations: Identify regional bottlenecks and optimize accordingly.

• Third-party dependencies: Pinpoint issues originating from CDNs, DNS providers, and other external services impacting user experience.

Going deeper with agent diversity

Breadth of location is not enough to get the best visibility into experience. It is critical to take advantage of an network with various agent types, each designed to provide specific insights:

• Backbone Agents: Strategically located in major Internet exchange points, providing a broad view of core Internet health and performance. This helps identify widespread network issues that might impact many users.

• Last Mile Agents: Situated within diverse residential and business networks, simulating the experience of typical end-users. This reveals performance issues specific to certain ISPs or geographic areas.

• Wireless Agents: Monitoring performance over various mobile networks (3G, 4G, 5G), crucial for understanding the experience of on-the-go users.

• Cloud Agents: Deployed within major cloud providers (hyperscalers), offering insights into the performance and availability of cloud-based applications and services.

• Enterprise Agents: Deployed within your own infrastructure, extending Catchpoint's powerful monitoring capabilities behind your firewall for a hybrid view.

In a way, geographic breadth tells you what the real-world user experience is, while the agent depth tells you why the experience is like that and what is impacting it.  

Further, an operations team would combine synthetic data collected from these agents proactively with real-user monitoring data, BGP routing information, code traces, and other valuable data to get the best visibility possible.

Without these, an IT operations team may find themselves in a situation where users (or their business partners) complain about bad user experience, while the monitoring systems (which myopically monitor everything from a handful cloud locations) say everything looks good.

The result?

By leveraging rich data collected by a broad and deep set of intelligent agents, observability teams can:

• Proactively detect and resolve performance degradations before they impact users and business outcomes.

• Isolate the root cause of issues faster, whether it's in their own infrastructure, a third-party service, or a network problem in a specific region.

• Optimize application delivery and infrastructure based on real-world performance data, leading to improved user satisfaction and business efficiency.

• Validate SLAs with objective, geographically diverse performance metrics.

• Gain a holistic understanding of their Internet Stack, bridging the gap between infrastructure metrics and user experience.

To close the gap between synthetic tests and real-world performance, Catchpoint has launched Connected Devices—a powerful new layer of observability that brings hyper-local visibility into how DNS, CDN, ISP, and other critical services perform at the street, neighborhood, or city-block level. By tapping into tens of millions of lightweight agents on real devices, Connected Devices helps surface micro-outages and regional performance issues that traditional monitoring often misses.

Ready to unlock the full potential of observability? Learn more about Catchpoint's intelligent agent network and how it can transform your monitoring strategy: https://www.catchpoint.com/global-observability-network  

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