Catchpoint vs. SolarWinds Pingdom

A Solid product, provides meaningful accurate data results from synthetic monitoring. Catchpoint as a vendor has acted as a reliable business partner and promotes good relationship with customers and provides them with meaningful support. Support engineer and account manager make efforts to maintain helpful relationship for services offered. Been able to work with us to provide input for code changes and enhancements for payload used for synthetics.

Incentivized

I believe the scenarios we used it for were quite well covered, from the executive perspective. The downtime alarms worked very well and were easy to setup, uptime monitoring tools were clear and easy to use, even for non-technical people (C-level) and the SLA management tools allowed us to spend less time, and have less friction, with our clients

Incentivized

• Global Monitoring: Catchpoint offers an extensive network of monitoring locations worldwide, allowing organizations to simulate user experiences from different geographical regions. This capability helps identify performance variations based on location, ensuring a consistent and optimal experience for users across the globe.
• Alerting and Root Cause Analysis: Catchpoint offers robust alerting mechanisms that notify organizations when performance thresholds are exceeded or anomalies occur. These alerts enable prompt incident response and troubleshooting. Catchpoint's root cause analysis capabilities help identify the underlying causes of performance issues by analyzing network conditions, DNS resolutions, server responses, or content delivery problems.

Incentivized

• The alerts are very responsive offering quite detailed timing information
• The UI for reports is very clear and set up of reports is very intuitive
• Customer service was good when there were problems - e.g. lapsing billing causing reporting to go down

Incentivized

• The ability to monitor the Catchpoint nodes with the ability to setup a take a recovery action based on specific criteria
• The ability to tell us when we are at X% capacity so that we better plan or budget for increasing the "capacity" of the Catchpoint nodes before we get to an overloaded state. The capacity utilization graph is not a reliable indicator for this metric. How can the capacity utilization rate get above 100%, it does not make sense

Incentivized

• The PagerDuty integration could be a lot better. When you use the PagerDuty integration, it doesn't send any information about which check failed! It just sends a message like "Timeout (> 30s)" -- this isn't very helpful when we have hundreds of checks. We've worked around this by using both the PagerDuty and Slack integrations and having them both post to the same Slack channel. But this means that when an engineer is paged from PagerDuty, they have to go to Slack (or Pingdom) to find the details about the page; it's not available on the page itself.

Incentivized

we are heavily dependent catchpoint system for the following functions * Detect end-user availability/performance-related problems * Ensures
service level objectives (SLO) are met, that prevents service level
agreement (SLA) breaches * Identify and understand the cause of any
network connectivity or application level issue * Improves the
availability and response time service levels

Incentivized

Recently added features have made Pingdom less intuitive for our requirements. While Pingdom has a broad offering and remains a good value, it is becoming more than we need. Our customer base is becoming more and more global and Pingdom still lacks Asia-Pacific monitoring, which we will need within a year.

It's hard to find the functionalities that I am looking for in the application. Even if I did something in the past, after a time I have to re-learn again where the functionalities are. This is a powerful tool, but not user-friendly. Texts in the buttons and menus are not always meaningful or easily comprehensible.

Incentivized

Pingdom is easy to use, very intuitive and has a very short learning curve. From the onset, we've been able to jump in and leverage the tool to accomplish our goals for page speed performance and discover the insights we need to make improvements. Its a well-designed tool and makes for a good user experience.

Incentivized

Interface is unnecessarily complicated and frequently responds slowly.

Catchpoint exceptional service has consistently exceeded my expectations.
Their technical expertise, coupled with their timely responses to
queries and issues, demonstrates their dedication to customer
satisfaction. Additionally, the
support team's ability to provide actionable advice and guidance has
enabled me to resolve complex problems efficiently and effectively.

Incentivized

Support responded the same day to my query, as I was setting the product up but couldn't find the setting I needed. This was successfully resolved in a short time frame, so I was pleased with how quickly we were able to get this resolved. I haven't needed to contact support since.

Incentivized

very easy to implement as the product is user-friendly

Incentivized

Primary reason we went with Catchpoint is that they offered us actual backbone testing locations. All the other features like a filmstrip and traceroutes have been very beneficial as well and were not available in the competitors' solutions.

Incentivized

1. PRTG Network Monitor was a far more complicated tool to use and set up albeit it does both Internal and External monitoring. The setup wasn't intuitive and there are too many configuration options to complete to form an alert
2. Amazon CloudWatch is specific to AWS resources and cannot be easily use outside of the AWS Ecosystem

Incentivized

• The ROI has been very good with this product, we have seen multiple folds of time-saving by using this tool and preempting any risk associated with non-performant times of our server, hence increasing the team's capability to respond to certain downtime scenarios and the level of action that needs to be taken.
• Catchpoint’s observability solution makes it easier to have global visibility of our website's performance and to fix issues quicker
• I don't have any negatives, every good product comes with a cost, that is the fact but the Catchpoint tool has ultimately improved our ROI much beyond the changes that we pay

Incentivized

• Honestly, we have 4 other products that overlap this functionality whose organizations provide far superior support. At this point it is an unnecessary expense.
• In my opinion, their lack of support responsiveness and commitment has impacted our IT agility.
• Its time to explore other alternatives.