To celebrate our 13th birthday today, I sat down with Catchpoint's co-founders and my friends, Mehdi Daoudi, Chief Executive Officer, Drit Suljoti, Chief Product and Technology Officer, and J. Scotte Barkan, Chief Technology Officer (dialing in from Long Island after a long week of patch fixes), for an informal chat. We looked back to the days when they all met at DoubleClick prior to the three of them (along with Veronica Ellis, now a Principal Engineer at Eventbrite) founding Catchpoint.

September 7, 2021, 16:36 UTC: an outage hit Spectrum cable customers in the Midwest of the U.S., including Ohio, Wisconsin and Kentucky. Users of their broadband and TV services hit social media to voice their annoyance at the disruption it was causing. Everything was resolved at around 18:11 UTC, and services were restored to users.

Most developers and administrators think that adding a CDN-hosted static file improves performance. A CDN's fast edge servers cache content and deliver it based on the user’s geolocation. These cached servers are faster than a traditional single hosting server, and developers have received the benefit of convenience.

On Tuesday August 31, users across large parts of the West coast (US-West-2 region) were impacted by major spikes in response time. Some of AWS’ most critical services were affected, including Lambda and Kinesis. SRE teams care about Service Level Indicators (SLIs) and Service Level Objectives (SLOs), and this practice is a must for SRE teams.

This summer has seen a series of outages and performance degradations from some of the world’s most widely used CDNs, including the June 8, 2021 Fastly outage (owing to DNS or configuration issues) and an Akamai outage on July 22, 2021 (also likely caused by DNS failure).

Collaboration tools like Slack and Teams are here to stay. They’re very much inseparable from the distributed workforce that we all continue to find ourselves in. A robust set of integrations are then an essential part of today's monitoring and observability platforms. Feeding Catchpoint data into your support team via a Slack channel could be the difference between catching a disruption early or having to respond to a full-blown outage.

All of us here at Catchpoint are passionate about continuously innovating and improving our product to make our customers’ lives better. Part of this process involves regular product releases is – and this latest one, Hercules, is no exception. A big focus area for this release has been improving the usability, quality, and performance of the Catchpoint portal and agent.

Efficient root cause analysis is vital to incident management. How quickly an issue can be understood determines the mean time to resolve (MTTR), which directly impacts the digital experience. When there is a sudden outage or a performance degradation, root cause analysis can become laborious given the complexity of all the components involved and the potentially huge amount of observability data generated from different sources.

The content delivery network (CDN) has been an integral part of application infrastructure for more than two decades. A CDN is critical to the end-user experience, but it is no longer considered to be just a caching server. It has evolved to provide security from cyber threats, including DDOS attacks along with front end optimization. Although CDN services are now an indispensable part of any application infrastructure, visibility into CDN performance remains limited.