Catchpoint

Catchpoint is the way to go when you need a 24/7 reliable monitoring for your servers and system anywhere around the whole world.

It is well suited if you want to monitor your service availability in China.

It also allows you to the whole request flow and you can also add RUM which is real user monitoring.

希望加入中文和中国区域的测试 (Hope to join the test in Chinese and Chinese regions)- Google translate

I find Catchpoint to be a great tool for the performance/availability monitoring, reporting and troubleshooting.
It could be an overkill for a quick QA purposes perhaps, but I still utilise it even for that.

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.

Catchpoint is well suited if the business demands constant health checks of their mission critical applications.

Catchpoint is really helpful when we have any new deployments and help us in testing the reliability and availability of web application from various locations. It also helps us in understanding the user traffic from the various locations, which helps us in managing our server scaling in different locations. It also helps us with [the] observability and implementation of SRE in tracking SLAs.

Catchpoint is well suited for various scenarios where monitoring and maintaining service performance is crucial. Here are some specific examples: 1. E-commerce Websites: Catchpoint is highly effective for monitoring the performance of e-commerce websites, where even a slight drop in response time can result in significant revenue loss. By continuously monitoring key transactional paths, Catchpoint helps identify performance bottlenecks, such as slow page load times, checkout issues, or payment gateway errors, allowing businesses to promptly resolve them and provide a seamless shopping experience. 2. Content Delivery Networks (CDNs): CDNs play a vital role in delivering website content efficiently. Catchpoint can monitor CDN performance by measuring cache-hit ratios, delivery speeds, and response times from different geographic locations. This helps CDN providers ensure optimal content distribution and quickly identify any issues that may impact content delivery across the network. 3. SaaS Applications: Catchpoint is valuable for monitoring the availability and performance of Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) applications. It helps SaaS providers monitor service uptime, response times, and API availability to ensure that customers can access the application and its functionalities reliably. Catchpoint's alerts can promptly notify providers of any service disruptions, enabling them to minimize downtime and maintain a high level of customer satisfaction. While Catchpoint is highly suitable for monitoring a wide range of services, there are certain scenarios where it may be less appropriate: 1. Local Network Monitoring: Catchpoint primarily focuses on external monitoring from various locations worldwide. It may not be the best choice for monitoring internal network performance or detecting issues within a closed local network environment. For such cases, other network monitoring tools that specialize in internal network monitoring may be more suitable. 2. Resource-Constrained Environments: Catchpoint's monitoring requires dedicated resources for deploying monitoring nodes across different locations. In resource-constrained environments, where limited infrastructure or budget may hinder deploying multiple monitoring nodes, alternative monitoring solutions that offer more lightweight or cost-effective options could be considered. In summary, Catchpoint excels in scenarios where external monitoring, performance optimization, and user experience are critical. It may be less appropriate for internal network monitoring or resource-constrained environments that require more specialized or cost-effective solutions.

Based on my experience, Catchpoint is well suited for the following scenarios: Website and Application Performance Monitoring: Catchpoint is particularly effective in monitoring the performance of websites and applications. It can track metrics such as page load times, transaction speeds, and availability from various global locations. This makes it ideal for organizations that rely heavily on their digital platforms and want to ensure optimal performance for their users. E-commerce and Online Retail: Catchpoint is well suited for e-commerce and online retail businesses. It enables them to monitor and optimize the end-to-end user experience, including website performance, checkout processes, and transaction completion. Catchpoint's real user monitoring (RUM) capabilities provide valuable insights into user behavior and help identify any issues that may impact conversion rates or customer satisfaction. Global User Experience Monitoring: For organizations with a global user base or a distributed infrastructure, Catchpoint's ability to monitor user experiences from different geographical locations is highly beneficial. It helps identify performance disparities, regional bottlenecks, or latency issues that may affect users in specific regions. This allows organizations to proactively optimize their services and ensure consistent user experiences worldwide.

One of the services we offer is an ecommerce platform, so website performance is critical. Catchpoint's synthetic test tools helps us identify and resolve issues that may be impacting their conversion rates and user satisfaction. We also use it for our business management service where we use the tests to monitor our uptime performance to make sure we are meeting our SLAs to our customers

The UI is very rich and allows the user to get into as much detail as they may need to analyze a test result. If a Catchpoint node is assigned to a specific division, say divisionA, it should NOT be available for users of divisionB to schedule to run scripts or even for running instant tests. Basically, users of divisionB should only be allowed to schedule scripts on divisionB nodes as well as to run instant test only on divisionB nodes. In the main division aka client division, Catchpoint admins should be able to BOTH see the performance of the Catchpoint nodes for all divisions as well as the ability to run an instant test against any division. Currently, a Catchpoint admin can see the performance of all the Catchpoint nodes but need to switch to divisionB (say) to be able to run an instant test on a divsionB node. Users with non-admin Catchpoint roles should NOT be allowed to do this. For easier maintenance, we need the ability to copy/move scripts from divisionA to divisionB, currently we can only copy/move scripts within the same division only.

It is very well suited to monitor region specific/ISP specific issues or any other local issues caused due to any other network components or infrastructure.
It is less suited for server side performance for which we need a separate APM tool.

Catchpoint is best suited for synthetic monitoring. It helps navigate through complex websites and gather metrics. Analyzing the metrics is much easier with Catchpoint dashboards. It is a great tool for monitoring performance of the system and is well-suited if the system needs constant performance monitoring.

Well suited for monitoring and protecting endpoints in the internet. Also helps to run periodic automation tests to make sure responses are properly given. We can run puppeteer as well to capture screenshots if the UI is broken.

Web browser based transactions or API endpoint health checks.

It's great!

it is very good for seeing site performance metrics in and outside of our internal environments. We love using RUM and being able to see what the users themselves are doing. Sometimes the UI can be unintuitive, but the options and customizations available are excellent, and setting up favorites for different teams has made a big difference in single stop and view sort of spaces for different dev teams.

If you are in need of complex synthetic monitoring tests then look no further. They support basic functions like logins, verification of text present, etc to more complex like uploads, downloads, drag, and drop. Also, their results page is amazing. The waterfall really helps you debug a failed test, the screenshots make it even easier.

Working as a support developer for loreal, alerting was the main feature that helped us in improving efficiency. Whenever some breaking changes occur to the site, it immediately triggers the email which helps in minimizing the loss of revenue to the client as we as a developer would the issue immediately to resolve it or raise an alarm to the 3rd party if they are the reason.

Experience testing. We have many many many forms that require the user step thru certain sequences to get to specific places to enter in the information. Once achieved, the user must use that information to perform other actions that must be frequently tested for response time and information accuracy. Once the first several forms are completed, they will in turn effect the outcome of the other actions. CP allows us to test each step of the experience and allows us to focus on specific actions and results. CP is not well suited to test environments that are ever changing as it is not as modularized as it can be. In environments that constantly change, it is difficult to keep CP up to date.

I have used Catchpoint only for monitoring web service APIs (HTTP/REST APIs), and I don't have any experience in using it for emulating browser behavior. Catchpoint is suitable for simple availability and performance monitoring of HTTP REST APIs, but not flexible enough for (easily) implementing more complex test scenarios or alert conditions. It works well for small-scale use (configuration through web UI), but managing very large configurations (tens of tests) becomes hard because of insufficient API/automation support.

Catchpoint has a vast and robust interface for all kinds of endpoint monitoring and testing. It is reliable, somewhat easy to configure, and can integrate into many third-party alerting tools. Setting up many endpoints can take a while, so a "quick add" or "bulk add" feature would be helpful. The interface is constantly being updated and improved based on user feedback, so if those features don't exist, they'll probably exist soon.

Catchpoint is a best-in-class synthetic monitoring solution. They still need some work on their real-user monitoring solution. While the browser recorder does allow you to record scripts, you will still need to tune the script to make it work reliably. If you do not have those skills, you may find it frustrating.

Catchpoint is well suited for synthetic monitoring. It is not as appropriate for checking availability and production support monitoring. Alerting is hard to understand.

If you are a DevOps engineer who tracks the availability of the application, Catchpoint is one quick tool you should start using. It gives you real-time statistics for the application's availability and reliability. Not only for the operation team, but it is also helpful for the developers to keep track of the transactions in their application. I have a developer friend who has shared his success with Catchpoint, [however,] since I am not completely aware of [the details of] his experience, I am not able to share it here.

[For example,] let's say you just developed a web application where you want to see continuous/real-time error findings: you can simply use this amazing tool to write a simple script with commands to deploy along with the application. So that for every action in your web application, Catchpoint is tied there to monitor the performance of the application.