Catchpoint vs. Zscaler Digital Experience (ZDX)

I like the synthetic test feature it has from the edge which mimics the real user - that for me is one of the best features. The certificate expiration, the API monitoring, the slowness breakdown to show where the slowdown happens, and more.

Incentivized

We specifically use Zscaler Digital Experience (ZDX) for monitoring critical apps and apps that are known for having connection issues. Some critical SaaS apps for example would be Zoom (call quality), Genesys (call quality), Microsoft Services, Service Now, etc. Zscaler Digital Experience (ZDX) is perfect for quick troubleshooting and providing a quick Mean-time to Innocence (MTTI) for Zscaler since it is often blamed for issues given it is our forward proxy and primary means of internet security.

Incentivized

• Our standard operating material documents Catchpoint’s breadth on HTTP/Browser, API, Streaming, DNS, FTP, TCP, SMTP, Ping, Traceroute, SSH with content validation and custom widgets/dashboards. This gives SREs and L0/L1 a single place to validate both page flows and the underlying network/application protocols.
• Product runbooks use Catchpoint to validate critical steps (for ex, login, overview dashboard, unit dashboards) and to detect DNS issues that break those journeys. so we catch experience regressions even when the backend looks healthy.
• We’ve standardized Catchpoint alert categories/templates with ITSM so L0 includes the right analysis in handoffs. This tightened “first message, best message” during incidents.
• Our operating procedures use Catchpoint for alwayson availability checks with email notifications and multi‑location verification when a site is down. This is useful for unambiguous “is it up/where is it failing” signals.

Incentivized

• To check user public IP for troubleshooting
• DNS configured on his device
• Add applications and monitor the performance

Incentivized

• Missing Functionality: For our organisation, we use multiple observability tools and what we miss in Catchpoint is its ability to display a list of muted monitors in the dashboard. This was a business requirement for our company where the business wanted to know at any given point of time, a list of monitors that were muted during an outage or a scheduled maintenance. This feature was unavailable in Catchpoint, however, we hope to see some enhancements in the future.

Incentivized

The Catchpoint tool has now become an integral part of our DevOps toolkit due to its extensive range of capabilities, including application performance monitoring, network health tracking, DNS visibility, and edge performance analysis. Its seamless integration with our existing monitoring infrastructure has significantly enhanced our ability to detect potential issues proactively, analyze root causes in real time, and resolve incidents much faster, ultimately improving overall system reliability and user experience.

Incentivized

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

Feels often hard to discern what tab one needs to be in to see relevant information. If I am in applications looking at it and I find a few people have issues, I then have to leave the applications tab to go to each individual user and discern why they are having issues instead of being able to select all of those individuals and lump them together. It does do geo grouping though which sometimes helps.

Incentivized

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.

Incentivized

very easy to implement as the product is user-friendly

Incentivized

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.

Incentivized

We have also used Cisco Thousand Eyes and NextThink. Imagine a product that offers the best of both worlds and is still somehow more powerful and easier to deploy than either one- that is Zscaler Digital Experience (ZDX).

Incentivized

• Catchpoint is not the only monitoring tool we use for our web properties. The test alerts raised by Catchpoint serves as a confirmation of possible outages/problems with an application. This has helped to reduce false-positive alerts thus improving the response of the operations team; they don't have spend time chasing ghosts
• The unlimited scheduled tests we can run on the enterprise nodes has been a very cost effective solution compared to similar web monitoring tools
• The ability to quickly dive into the test result details help to get to the root cause of a test failure quickly

Incentivized

• Excellent end to end visibility
• Proactive issue detection
• User friendly dashboards

Incentivized