Catchpoint Reviews

Catchpoint is used for synthetic monitoring. For example, if you have a URL, you may want to ensure that your customer's journey is monitored from a user-experience standpoint. 

In Catchpoint, you can enter the user action, and that user action can then be configured as a script. Catchpoint will then continue to emulate that user's steps every 5 minutes or 10 minutes, as it is defined by you.

If you have a service product and have just exposed the API in your data. In those cases, you can perform API monitoring by passing sample data contracts and validating whether your API is responding to the query or not. It can also tell you what the time is, what the response score is, and so on.

That is the function of features. The most valuable features of Catchpoint are basically the transaction monitors on the API and UI.

Because these transaction monitors also monitor your product's entry-point URLs, there are numerous things it can do to improve. Assume you have a SaaS for a company, and they want to add a status page as a feature. When a company decides to set up monitors for their entry-point URLs, that status page can be exposed to customers as well.

Catchpoint can display downtime as the status whenever it detects it. And can be used by the company to demonstrate to their customers that there is a downtime occurring and that we are working on it, from the standpoint of customer communication.

That is the other issue, in that their API is extensive but also a lot. There are essentially a lot of quotas. Nobody wants to sit and manually create monitors for someone who uses synthetic monitoring.

With the direction of the industry, many people want to work in automation. Creating monitors as automation is an important aspect of their growth, which I did not see when I used it because they did not have an API for which you could actually create monitors.

I have been working with Catchpoint for approximately five or six years.

As Catchpoint is a SaaS provider, we would be working with the latest version.

Catchpoint is a SaaS product that serves as a central monitoring tool. Catchpoint provides virtual agents, but you can also have your own nodes in your environment. 

In my experience, we have used a combination of the two. The nodes were set up on AWS in the cloud to monitor the health of internal URLs. Then, for the public, for example, for region-specific monitoring, we wanted to use a German monitor. Then, using Catchpoint, publish your virtual monitors and agents.

Catchpoint is a very stable solution.

Scalability, I believe, is a perspective. From a scalability standpoint, it is good at times and bad at others, in my opinion. Assuming I have a single node, I'll show an example of Catchpoint hosted in my own environment.

If I host a Catchpoint node on my own and that node fails for whatever reason, there is no way for me to create nodes in a cluster so that if one node fails, the monitor picks up the other node and so on. On the UI, that is a manual configuration. I need to make a node group or something similar by grouping three nodes together.

If the load on a single node is high, Catchpoint does not distribute the load across the node group that was created. If they can handle it, it will be very, very good for scalability. Otherwise, their public nodes, such as the virtual agents that they provide, are sufficiently scalable. They can handle them on their own. The only issue with scalability arises when you deploy your own node in your environment.

It's our team, the observability team, which consists of about 5 to 10 people. We are in charge of setting up the transaction monitors.

Everyone who owns the product. They are used by product teams. Overall, in the company, there are approximately 5,000 users.

Technical support is good.  They also provide professional services, which are good.

It is fairly easy to set up.

We had it up and running in a day.

In terms of licensing fees, I believe they were slightly higher. I believe their primary market is large enterprises, but from a licensing cost standpoint, I believe there are other tools available that provide the same functionality at a lower cost, such as Pingdom and others.

There are numerous sites available 24 hours a day, seven days a week. There are numerous other synthetic monitoring tools that compete with Catchpoint. However, I believe Catchpoint positions itself as a tool for large enterprises with money to spend, which is why they are expensive.

I would advise them to use this product if they can afford it.

I would rate Catchpoint an eight out of ten.

They only lose two points for the cost; otherwise, the insights they provide are really good. There are not many competitive tools that don't provide them.

Public Cloud

Amazon Web Services (AWS)

We are using this to monitor our applications, our global applications, like the Autodesk Store, Autodesk.com application websites, Autodesk subscription portal, Autodesk account management. So all those global websites that our customers access are monitored through Catchpoint. It's used as a global synthetic monitoring solution.

Catchpoint is actually catching issues before customers see them, since it's checking the sites every five minutes or even every minute, via the APIs. So, it's catching issues alerting the team proactively that there is an issue.

We really need the API monitoring, as well as client side session monitoring, the global synthetic monitoring, to track the availability of the systems from the customer side. So, it's mainly used to measure the availability and to check whether the sites are available from the customer's perspective. It's used to test it from the end-user perspective.

There are lots of areas. One is, if we need to do performance analysis, we have to click too many times. For example, if there is an issue that is caught by Catchpoint, we need to understand what the error is and at which step it failed, or which transaction that is impacted. To drill down, we have to click too many things to get the answer.

One to three years.

So far we have not had any issues with stability.

Scalability, since it's a specific appliance that we purchase and we consume, there is no way to scale, but it's easy to scale if we have to buy additional licenses. But it's a long process.

The thing I like most is the tech support in this company, because they have 24/7 chat support. We can chat immediately and ask them about an issue and they keep responding. They create tickets on our behalf and respond. That's the best part of Catchpoint compared to all other products. This is not a feature that is available with all of our companies. We can go to support and there is always a person sitting there and answering our questions.

We previously used Sitescope. It is a high-speed product but it was not evolving to match the technology changes that were happening in the industry, like syndicated applications, APIs, and different encryptions. It was not handling or supporting those types of things. Whereas Catchpoint supports all these things: single-page application, AJAX, different types of authentications. We wanted to move to that.

The setup was straightforward.

We worked with the support team. At that time they did not have a dedicated training portal. Now, they have come up with a dedicated training portal where we can do training. It's available for all customers and you then get certification. So they have made it easy.

The price and licensing are very, very high. They have to come down on the pricing to match with the industry standard. I don't think they will be able to get customers.

During that time we evaluated New Relic. New Relic did not have an on-prem node. We had some internal applications, so we needed both internal and external application monitoring. The internal application monitoring was not supported, only the external application was supported by New Relic. Whereas, at that time, Catchpoint supported both, so that's one reason.

The other reason was that Catchpoint uses a scripting language called Selenium, which is very similar to our testing framework, so it was really easy. The Selenium test scripting framework was the main reason we picked it because our team, our company, is familiar with this language, the scripting language they use for all the monitoring scripts.

We also evaluated Dynatrace. Dynatrace was closer, but at that time they didn't have the same kind of on-prem node.

I have noticed they are coming up with APIs to get metrics and then prepare dashboards. Also, they are enhancing their reports on transaction monitoring and they're coming up with solution enhancements every quarter. I really like that.

In terms of advice, it can differ from company to company. For example, if you're looking for solutions like just web page monitoring or the API, I would say Catchpoint is the best one. But if requirements involve database queries, SNMP monitoring, etc., they don't have it. They're working on fixing that, I think. 

But web page monitoring, when it comes to global synthetic monitoring, I recommend them for just web pages.

I would rate Catchpoint at seven out of 10 overall. There are a few enhancements that we have requested, as I mentioned, such as better drill-down to get failure details. That's one of the major things. And then there is trending. Currently, out-of-the-box, they provide only seven days availability. So, we have to do queries and we have to go into a separate analysis module, we have to run lot of queries to long-term trends. Long-term trends are something that management is always keen about. Those are the areas that, if they improve, I would rate them a 10.

Catchpoint is clearly the leader in the industry on pretty much every metric you look at (aside from market share...for now), and blows Keynote/Gomez out of the water when it comes to features and support. Mehdi (the CEO) is accessible at all hours of the day and night for any and all questions, and his average response time must be under an hour. Catchpoint has everything you could want in a synthetic tool, and many things that you didn't know you wanted but you are ecstatic to have. I can't say enough good things about the people that work at Catchpoint and their commitment to building the best product in their space.

The only thing that occasionally bugs me about Catchpoint is some aspects of the UI. It's not an easy problem, and I don't know how I would solve it, but because of the large volume of data that they are presenting and the various ways to slice it, you can end up with a proliferation of windows when debugging an issue. This is something that I expect to improve in the near future, since Catchpoint has rapid releases and is extremely receptive to customer feedback.

I use the platform for endpoint monitoring, web page monitoring, and server activity tracking. It helps diagnose issues within networks, service providers, or local data networks.

The product's most valuable feature is the ability to identify and troubleshoot network issues. It provides insights into problem areas and helps generate detailed reports for claims and issue resolution.

The product could include global monitoring and predictive analytics to identify widespread issues and cyber threats.

I have been working with Catchpoint for almost a year.

The setup is straightforward.

The solution's pricing varies based on services and licensing models. Clients typically see significant operational and cost efficiencies, with time savings estimated between 30% and 40%.

The tool provides rapid alerts, typically within five minutes. It enhances response times and improves operational efficiency.

I recommend it to others and rate it a nine out of ten.