Whether you are a Site Reliability or Network Engineer, or simply involved in monitoring a digital service, you know by now that if DNS is not working properly – your users are experiencing an outage. However, despite its importance in ensuring the resilience and availability of the web, DNS is often not monitored correctly, which can mean undetected outages and any associated ripple effects on your business.

This week over at WebPageTest, we’re excited to be taking our first steps into the performance education space with our new completely free online course, Lightning-Fast Web Performance by WPT Senior Experience Engineer, Scott Jehl. This course is for you, whether you’re a DevOps engineer curious to learn more about WebPerf or you’re part of a front-end and QA team responsible for website optimization and lowering latency.

At Catchpoint, we release new features approximately seven times annually. Catchpoint’s previous release, Andante, includes a variety of updates and new features, including a powerful new smartboard redesigned to be more intuitive and help our users find solutions faster, additional metrics to strengthen our unique RUM solution, and the ability to generate alerts for workforce experience based on issues your Digital Experience Score identifies.

For the past 25 years, I’ve been monitoring networks, applications, services, basically anything digital on a quest to understand “when is it safe to cross the road”! We all know, just blindly crossing a road is EXTREMELY dangerous!

On July 8 of 2022, the Canadian telecom company Rogers Communications suffered a major outage that impacted most of Canada for almost two days. This wasn’t completely unprecedented (they’d had an outage in 2021 that impacted their wireless servers for several hours) but the breadth and severity of this one is going to end up costing them far, far more than it seems at first glance.

Recently, I was talking to Catchpoint’s High School Summer Interns about what software engineering is all about. They’re spending a week at a time with various Catchpoint departments, and last week was with the Catchpoint Technology Group.

Happy System Administrator’s Day! July 29th is the day we thank and honor all the hard-working system administrators (and network administrators, network engineers, IT helpdesk staff – basically anyone who helps keep the networks up and running) for all their hard work. You’ve spent the last year fixing problems, onboarding users, integrating new systems and keeping the entire world connected.