The lights on the dashboards that monitor network and application performance are flashing green, indicating all is well. At the same time, however, frustrated employees are filing trouble tickets over slow internet, customers are dropping out in the middle of online transactions because pages aren’t loading fast enough, and the brand is taking a beating on social media, with one post after another complaining about a poor customer experience.
When IT managers dive in to troubleshoot, they often don’t have visibility into the full Internet Stack of ISPs, protocols, CDNs, cloud services and applications that could be contributing to the problem. Is this customer having an issue because the Wi-Fi at Starbucks is slow? Is this a first-mile problem or a last-mile problem? Is it affecting just me, which means I need to jump on it, or is it a broader internet issue that my ISP or cloud service provider needs to address?
The promise of Internet Performance Monitoring (IPM) is the ability to go beyond simple uptime/downtime diagnostics and actually measure user experience, giving IT teams the ability to quickly diagnose problems and address them. Even better, it empowers IT teams to be proactive – to spot an impending issue and remediate it before it gets to the point of impacting the user experience.
How IPM works
The flaw in traditional application performance monitoring (APM) is that it works from the inside out, collecting logs, but not necessarily generating any actionable insight from the mountains of data that are piling up.
By contrast, IPM works from the outside in, starting with the user experience, then working back to identify the root cause of an issue. IPM doesn’t just tell you that the network is up or down.
It drills down into specific metrics; can the end user reach the application, are all of the pieces of the application functioning as intended, is the application performing with the necessary speed and responsiveness, and is the customer getting a uniform experience, no matter how or where they connect?
The benefits of IPM
In a 2023 Forrester study, 88% of respondents estimated that their companies lost more than $100,000 due to internet disruptions in the prior month, while 51% reported losing more than $500,000.
IPM can help companies fix outages faster by taking advantage of full Internet Stack visibility to pinpoint the problem. IPM can also help companies learn from prior incidents to proactively prevent outages and improve the user experience.
Catchpoint leads the way
With more than 2,600 vantage points from more than 300 providers in 80 countries, Catchpoint’s global observability network detects outages across more than 50 of the most common internet platforms.
Catchpoint uses synthetic traffic, endpoint monitoring, real-user monitoring and web page testing to monitor everything from network traffic to how fast images are loading on your website to simulations of complex transactions and application flows.
Catchpoint also provides an Internet Sonar solution that monitors the internet for outages, and automatically correlates that information that with the organization’s monitoring to quickly help identify whether the problem is specific to the organization or a widespread outage, eliminating the need for unnecessary war rooms.
The Catchpoint user experience monitoring framework covers workforce experience, customer experience, application, website and network. The ultimate goal is to help enterprises deliver a great experience for their employees and customers.
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