Operations | Monitoring | ITSM | DevOps | Cloud

This was an important year for our industry. On one side, digital transformation efforts continue to make almost every business process and almost every human process digital, which means dependent on the internet. Almost every application, every system is cloud-centric, service-oriented, and composed of multiple geographically dispersed services. The Internet is fragile, complex, and constantly changing.

The recent ServiceNow Secure Sockets Layer (SSL) certificate error disrupted operations for hundreds of organizations causing widespread connectivity failures. IT operations stalled, developers hit roadblocks, and businesses across industries felt the impact. The culprit? An expired SSL certificate. While these disruptions highlight the importance of SSL monitoring, they point to a deeper issue: trust.

With the holiday shopping season in full swing, poor web performance can have a big impact on revenue. There’s intense competition for online shoppers, and customers will quickly bounce to another site instead of slogging through a bad experience. The best way to track and achieve your web performance goals is through experience-based SLOs (Experience Level Objectives, or XLOs).

Imagine you're on a website trying to purchase a product, but every time you click the "Add to Cart" button, nothing happens. Frustrating, isn’t it? Such moments can deter consumers from completing their online purchases. And while users find this annoying, it poses an even bigger challenge for businesses.

When your software powers productivity for millions of users, trust becomes your ultimate currency. Trust is earned through transparency, clear communication, and unwavering reliability—especially when disruptions occur. Microsoft learned this lesson recently during a significant outage that took down two of its flagship services: Outlook and Teams.

Dubbed 'the most important election ever,' it was expected that online traffic would skyrocket across traditional broadcasters, online streaming platforms, and digital publishers on November 5, 2024. As the initial results rolled in, Internet traffic surged nationwide by up to 15%, both at national and state levels. Surprisingly, though, this surge in traffic didn’t happen where you might expect—not on TV.

Every week, we hear about critical applications failing, leaving users frustrated and businesses scrambling. IT teams are fighting too many fires, dealing with too many disruptions, and spending too much time guessing instead of fixing. A 2023 study by Forrester Consulting found that in the month before the study, 37% of companies estimated they lost between $100,000-$499,000, and 39% lost $500,000-$999,999 due to internet disruptions. The costs are real, and they’re massive.

The CrowdStrike outage was a reminder of how quickly the dominoes can fall—especially when the foundation is shaky. Delta Airlines was hit harder than its competitors. While United and American Airlines were able to recover within days, Delta faced ongoing struggles, leading to the cancellation of 7,000 flights over five days.

Last month, web performance experts from leading brands joined an exclusive session with the Catchpoint product team to explore new features and future enhancements in WebPageTest and Catchpoint Internet Performance Monitoring (IPM). This post shares highlights from that session.