Many companies like Datadog, Dynatrace, and AppDynamics provide only synthetics. Catchpoint's IPM, however, is the exclusive provider of both synthetics and premiere Internet Synthetics.
What does that mean when comparing Synthetics and Internet Synthetics? It simply means we are the only platform purpose-built for one reason: to provide deep and wide visibility across the Internet Stack to reduce the frequency, duration, and impact of incidents before they impact your business.
Why it matters: In order to measure performance and ensure reach to all users around the world, websites must first be available. However, if organizations are both hosting and monitoring from the cloud when cloud outages or incidents occur, then practitioners are left flying blind since the monitoring tool and the hosted site are both impacted. In other words, a bad day will turn into an awful day.
Why it matters: Visibility into the entire Internet Stack allows you to manage distributed, complex architectures and see the impact of changes on the user's experience. Having proactive, granular data for all Internet Stack components - including more protocols than just web - is a mature IPM capability especially for proactive strategies (even when users are not on your site). This is also important when considering the potentially critical role third-party providers may play in delivering your user experiences. With Catchpoint’s Internet Synthetics, practitioners also have the unique ability to “bring your own” and turn any custom script into a monitor.
Why it matters: Monitoring from your cloud ISPs - which may be the same as where your business applications are hosted - monitors for uptime and availability of services at the source. However, if availability monitoring is performed from the same cloud hosting your sites, practitioners will be vulnerable to the "noisy neighbor" syndrome.
Why it matters: Diverse connection types give you the ability to monitor from where your users are and see the impact of Internet incidents on the user experience. Monitoring from diverse ISP and connection types are critical to ensure resiliency. This greater flexibility fulfills more monitoring use cases and allows you to adjust coverage as future needs arise or change.
Why it matters: With Catchpoint’s Enterprise Nodes, 100% of the monitoring capability set may also extend behind your firewall – or anywhere there is an internet connection. This means the same monitors or measures can be used to unlock new use cases like DevOps lifecycle support, pre-versus-prod comparisons, or internal application monitoring.
Why it matters: DNS response times are a good black box indicator. However, if DNS response times spike or don't resolve at all, practitioners realize the need for full DNS resolution-as-a-monitor capabilities.
Why it matters: Extensive DNS resolution data gives you the ability to maintain great digital first impressions and manage one of the Internet's most critical protocols - regardless of whether you host your own or rely on a third-party provider. With Catchpoint's IPM, you can fully resolve entire DNS resolution chains as-a-monitor and, more importantly, take specific actions on them. For example, you could perform performance regressions on level 2 resolution or alert if an IP resolves to an unexpected address.
Why it matters: Performance use cases are an evolutionary maturity step when evolving from basic uptime/availability metrics. However, if you can chart only basic averages, they can be misleading and unable to compare differences across dimensions.
Why it matters: Advanced performance analyses and intelligent analytics give you the ability to manage precious optimization activities (i.e., find insights in the "long tails"). While performance averages can give basic trending or directionality, these performance averages also notoriously hide the full story. By looking at full distributions (e.g., frequency or cumulative) across many calculations (e.g., percentiles) and dimensions (e.g., by ISP or geo), monitoring strategists can determine where to focus their precious optimization efforts and find new insights.
Why it matters: This is a core feature set available in most proactive monitoring capability sets. However, there are situations where "garbage in garbage out" worsens your signal-to-noise ratio, highlighting the need for advance alerting capabilities.
Why it matters: With Catchpoint’s Internet Synthetics, actionable insights are surfaced automatically without the need for humans to hunt for the needle in the haystack. Having the ability to improve signal-to-noise ratio, compare stack components in the same viewport, or base action on dynamic criteria has a substantial positive impact on improving mean time to detect and resolve.
Why it matters: Monitoring for an API 200 OK is a foundational, popular use case. However, a 200 OK does not mean the API is performing its intended function.
Why it matters: API transaction monitors give the ability to ensure APIs are properly behaving (a 200 OK does not mean an API is doing what's it's supposed to be and contributing to a healthy API economy). Monitoring strategists and engineers need to go beyond a 200 OK to ensure APIs are behaving as they should be. They need to analyze performance, ensure integrity (e.g., assertions), and validate functionality (e.g., execute monitoring payloads/polling and parse responses).
Why it matters: Raw, long-term data retention gives you the ability to answer previously unknown questions, perform vear-over-vear comparisons, or manage long-running SLA disputes. With Catchpoint's IPM, unlike most monitoring solutions, customers can retain raw data for many years. The "raw" callout is important especially when combined with our high level of data granularity and fidelity. In other words, we retain the raw data for all our captured metrics.
*The Catchpoint IPM Platform retains raw, non-aggregated data - for both Web and Internet Synthetics – for extended periods of time.
Why it matters: This gives the ability to reduce or eliminate impact from "Internet events". There are very few commercially available BGP monitoring products. Even fewer still, are BGP monitoring products which update in real-time. This is important for use cases like reachability, traffic shaping, vendor management, or just needing to know why users can't reach your site - even when your internal monitoring is "all green".
Why it matters: This gives the ability to extend troubleshooting all the way to your workforce's devices - wherever they are in the world. There are commercial offerings that can install agents on employee devices, but most of them collect passive data. This is versus proactively collecting data, e.g., running traces from their device to troubleshoot connectivity issues.
Why it matters: Several, but not all, synthetic monitoring tools allow integrations via REST API (e.g., pull data for the last one hour and put into a dashboard). However, for use cases where the fire hose needs to be on a maximum setting, practitioners will need real-time webhooks.
Why it matters: Real-time push integrations via a webhook offers several abilities. For example, with Catchpoint's IPM, you can achieve single pane of glass views (without sacrificing best-of-breed IPM data), power larger observability frameworks, or efficiently perform advanced correlations.