Blackfire.io is designed to empower PHP developers to continuously verify and improve their app’s performance in development, testing, staging and production. It makes it possible to drill down to function/method call level to understand and fix performance bottlenecks. The vendor says its wide variety of automation options makes it a breeze to add it to a development and testing workflow. The Blackfire Player, an Open Source Web Crawling, Web Tester, and Web…
N/A
Catchpoint
Score 8.9 out of 10
N/A
Catchpoint is an Internet Resilience solution offering services for retailers, Global2000, CDNs, cloud service providers, and xSPs that help increase their resilience by catching any issues in the Intenet Stack before they impact their business.
$37,950
per year
Pricing
blackfire.io
Catchpoint
Editions & Modules
No answers on this topic
No answers on this topic
Offerings
Pricing Offerings
blackfire.io
Catchpoint
Free Trial
Yes
Yes
Free/Freemium Version
Yes
No
Premium Consulting/Integration Services
No
No
Entry-level Setup Fee
Optional
No setup fee
Additional Details
—
- White glove migration services
- Annual subscription
- Professional Services
- Competitive Benchmarking
Blackfire.io is super helpful in allowing proactive testing of applications before releasing on the production environment. Blackfire.io provides actionable insights to improve code proactively by integration with the development software. Also tracks the live production environment and is able to highlight any loading issues or unusual bounce rates. Blackfire.io also monitors HTTP requests and SQL queries which again help improve efficiency for developers and reduce development time.
Proactive Website and API performance testing, Synthetic monitoring, and third-party integration are where Catchpoint is best suited. Catchpoint is less appropriate in Deep Application Performance monitoring, debugging complex user journeys in real-time, Small businesses, and Mobile app performance monitoring. These are the scenarios where I find Catchpoint is well-suited and scenarios where it is less appropriate.
Catchpoint Synthetics: We create our synthetic monitoring using catchpoint. Creating the synthetics monitors are easy and requires basic knowledge on selenium and javascript. It allows you to run the test from external(backbone) and internal enterprise nodes. The screenshot and filmstrip feature is an add-on along with various customisations. Once created, It provides a detailed insight of each request that is involved in the application flow which helps us in addressing the issue at the request level.
Catchpoint API Test: This is another kind of test which we have explored in our organisation. This has helped us to maintain the health check of our APIs and also we have utilised it for a variety of our use cases.
Catchpoint Dashboard: This is our one-stop shop for all our monitors. It has multiple widgets that displays various application performance metrics. We use this feature immensely and it is of great value to the business.
Catchpoint UI: It is very user friendly and with basic introduction anyone can just get started with it.
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
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
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.
The customer support is fantastic as they keep you updated and follow up even though we may not even follow up. Make sure they send a communication so that we remain updated. They value engineers who will get on a call with you to understand any requirement we have on any test, and they bring in the best developers on call.
blackfire.io definitely provides an edge over competing products such as Datadog due to the level of monitoring and analysis it provides. Datadog is a great tool however when evaluating and catching inefficiencies in lower non production environments, blackfire.io provides a level of reporting that were did not find any competing products.
Smart Bear Foglight Dynatrace CEM Catchpoint: I have used many synthetic monitoring products. Honestly, there are no big differences in features among all the products listed above or that I have used before. Probably, price and support might play big roles in selecting the products. I do not know the prices of these products.
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
