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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

Catchpoint is great at performance benchmarking, detecting availability issues, and above actual last mile monitoring. Their node diversity is impeccable.

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.

When we do a build on our system, it helps in immediately point out the areas affected by recent builds and helps us make a decision in future planning of our scope of code change, and improve the code quality of our deliverable by helping us always to be mindful of what you send in the build and it's particular impact hence narrowing down our scope of changes and help us make a better decision regarding the coding process and build process as well.

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 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.

Great for monitoring external sites.

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.

Catchpoint is reliable [for] monitoring our website and helping us improve TTFB. They are our canary in the coalmine. It is critical for us to know that our site may be experiencing issues before we [hear about] it from our customers. Catchpoint enables us to do just that. They also allow us clear visibility into new features [that] affect on-site speed performance so [that] we can continually optimize.

Catchpoint is an excellent service when tracking down issues. It also has an alert system to proactively detect problems. It is difficult to massage the alerts to prevent false positives, but it does find issues if they arise. They could improve by providing better dashboards that could be displayed on a monitor and [that don't] require intervention to refresh or login regularly.

If you are looking for a tool to measure actual end-user accessibility to your sites then this has to be one of your synthetic monitoring solutions. All the other vendors only provide cloud-based testing locations.