Blog post
Blog Post
2024: A banner year for Internet Resilience
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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. A reality that is made very evident for IT operations leaders who have to face outages that put the business at risk.
2024 marked a turning point as leading industry analysts are recognizing the importance for operations teams to complement APM investment with IPM platforms to get the visibility they need to achieve resilience.
Very significantly, Gartner Research published their first-ever Magic Quadrant™ for Digital Experience Monitoring (DEM) where they defined Internet Performance Monitoring as “typically includes monitoring the speed, reliability and overall quality of internet connections, as well as the performance of web applications and services delivered over the Internet” as they established that “the need to monitor and optimize the end-user experience across digital platforms is a critical aspect of modern IT operations”.
This point of view could drive more organizations to make the right investments in Internet Performance Monitoring (IPM) to improve the resilience and performance of all digital systems, and to ensure user experience. This post explores how IPM got better in the last year and what are the implications of those advancements.
Internet Resilience became a top business priority
In 2024, the inaugural Internet Resilience Report provided the first comprehensive analysis of Internet Resilience and its critical role in business success. Based on insights from over 300 digital leaders in North America and EMEA, the report establishes the foundation for understanding, measuring, and improving Internet Stack resilience in today’s interconnected world.
The result was a high level of consensus around why Internet Resilience matters:
- 97% of respondents stated that a reliable, resilient Internet Stack is of the utmost importance to their business success
- 78% cited improved customer experience as the primary motivator for resilience programs
- 43% estimated economic losses of over $1 million monthly due to Internet outages or degradations, with some reporting costs exceeding $10 million per month
Finding the root cause of disruptions got faster with dependency maps
This year, Internet Stack Map was a milestone innovation in IPM—a game-changing development that distills over 16 years of expertise into a single, AI-powered tool. With Internet Stack Map, IT and Operations teams can, for the first time, view a real-time, interactive map of all Internet dependencies that impact a service or application. It’s a live, detailed visualization that brings clarity to the complexity of the Internet Stack, empowering teams to answer the most critical question faster than ever: Why is my service slow or down?
Internet Stack Map changes the game by enabling you to:
- See the whole picture: A live, visual map of every dependency—internal and external—that your service relies on, from backbone connections to third-party APIs
- Troubleshoot faster: At-a-glance health status with clickable elements for detailed drilldowns into specific errors, dependencies, or tests
- Detect issues proactively: Real-time monitoring and historical analysis help you minimize downtime and understand performance trends over time
Finding what’s broken in the global Internet got easier
Today, almost every system relies on multiple distributed services across the Internet. Achieving resilience is impossible without considering these dependencies: ISPs, DNS servers, cloud services, the MarTech stack for your website, etc. In this context the role of Internet Sonar is critical in monitoring third-party services and Internet health. Here are some ways Internet Sonar provides sharper, more actionable insights with this year’s enhancements:
- Stack Map filtering: Filter options now let you show outages in only those services included in a specified Stack Map, so your team stays focused on what matters most
- Interactive incident detail sidebar: The new sidebar enables seamless multitasking. While viewing incident details, you can continue to use other features like timelines, maps, and network visualizations—without closing the sidebar
- Richer outage details: The incident detail sidebar now includes additional context, such as affected IPs and domains, giving your team the critical data needed to isolate and resolve issues faster
In 2024, Internet Sonar became even more powerful, offering deeper, real-time visibility into third-party dependencies, cloud services, ISPs, SaaS providers, and other critical components of the Internet Stack.
Operations teams gained full visibility from user to code with Tracing
In 2024, adding tracing to the IPM platform enabled IT Operations teams to get full visibility into the entire user journey—from the user device down to individual lines of code. Unlike traditional APM tools, tracing in IPM offers an outside-in perspective, helping identify whether application issues are the root cause of user experience problems. While it is not aimed at replacing a full APM suite for developer teams, it is significantly less expensive to deploy across systems and provides unique insights to operations teams in the context of user experience.
Key benefits include:
- End-to-end diagnosis: Trace failed requests across applications, architectures, and components to rapidly identify root causes and reduce MTTR
- OpenTelemetry support: Seamlessly integrate tracing data with other observability frameworks, ensuring flexibility and compatibility across your ecosystem
- Ease of deployment: Automated instrumentation and straightforward pricing enable fast, hassle-free setup without requiring code changes
Learn more about distributed tracing
It became easier to make tier-1 applications resilient
This year, we introduced AppAssure, a turnkey solution designed to simplify and streamline application performance monitoring. AppAssure is an affordable package, providing everything you need to begin monitoring your critical apps and services to make sure they run smoothly—all in one super affordable package with no agents, no installs, and no hassles.
Instead of spending hours configuring tests, fine-tuning dashboards, and managing onboarding, AppAssure includes services that take care of the heavy lifting for you. The result? Your team can focus on what really matters: preventing downtime, optimizing performance, and delivering seamless digital experiences.
Here are some examples of applications where AppAssure delivers impact:
- E-commerce websites, SaaS applications, and their mobile counterparts
- Vendor ordering and management systems, EDI, and other supply-chain applications
- Electronic payment, credit card processing, banking, and treasury apps
- Operational applications: logistics, travel applications, fleet management
- Hospital systems: HER, point-of-care systems, care management protocols, etc.
XLOs are becoming the metric to align IT with the rest of the business
The concept of Experience-Level Objectives (XLOs) is transforming how organizations define and measure digital success. Most Service-Level Objectives (SLOs) are based on availability and uptime. Availability is important, but “slow is the new down.” XLOs shift the spotlight to what truly matters: the user’s experience.
We’ve developed XLO monitoring to measure the following performance metrics:
- Wait Time: The duration between the user’s request and the server’s initial response
- Response Time: The total time taken for the server to process a request and send back the complete response
- First Contentful Paint (FCP): The time it takes for the browser to render the first piece of content on the screen
- Largest Contentful Paint (LCP): Time when the largest content is visible within the browser
- Cumulative Layout Shift (CLS): A measure of how much the layout of the page shifts unexpectedly during loading
- Time to Interactive: The time it takes for a page to become fully interactive and responsive to user inputs
This groundbreaking approach enables businesses to move beyond “Is it up?” to answer “Is it fast enough for our users?” which is really what the business cares about. By measuring success based on experience-driven performance metrics, you can align your objectives with what matters most—delivering seamless, frustration-free digital interactions, and align your metrics with the rest of the business, which can prove the value of IT Operations and help justify investments.
SLO vs XLO: Learn the difference
Web performance optimization gets better with enterprise capabilities
For years, front-end teams worked on web performance testing while operations teams worried about every other aspect of the system and achieving resilience. In 2024 this silo began to break down as we took a major step toward unifying performance insights by integrating WebPageTest (WPT) directly into the Catchpoint IPM platform. This integration combines the industry’s most trusted synthetic testing tool with Catchpoint’s comprehensive IPM platform, giving both web and operations teams a single platform that covers web performance optimization, CDN, DNS, BGP, RUM, and much more.
Key benefits of incorporating WPT into the Catchpoint IPM platform:
- Align teams within a unified platform: Reduce developer toil by using the same enterprise platform your teams already rely on.
- Foster collaboration: Enable front-end developers, SREs, DevOps, and WebOps to work together seamlessly within a single portal to address performance issues and optimize website performance.
- Enable a Shift-Wide Approach: Use the WebPageTest API to identify and fix issues not only in production, but also in QA, staging, and development environments.
- Correlate WPT Tests with Real User Insights: Link WPT tests with real user insights gleaned from Real User Monitoring (RUM) for a comprehensive understanding of your website's performance and the end-user experience
Whether you’re troubleshooting a specific issue or benchmarking your site against competitors, having WPT in the Catchpoint Portal provides a unified view of the metrics that matter most to your users.
We made it possible to monitor from where it matters in over 100 countries
In 2024, we expanded the world’s largest independent observability network, increasing our total coverage to 2,859 vantage points across 343 cities, 106 countries, and 1,344 public locations. This investment is a consequence of our goal to provide the absolute best visibility from every corner of the Internet, allowing you to monitor what matters from where it matters. Whether pinpointing regional ISP issues or monitoring edge and cloud locations, this network provides the depth of visibility needed to find and fix issues before your business is impacted.
Additionally, we enhanced our Enterprise Node offerings to provide even greater flexibility and performance monitoring capabilities within organizations.
What’s new with Enterprise Nodes?
- Enterprise Standard Nodes now support Ubuntu 22 and RHEL9, alongside existing OS options and Docker containers, ensuring compatibility across diverse IT environments.
- Enterprise Light Nodes introduced a lightweight, small-footprint solution for organizations with many remote offices or branches. These nodes are optimized for network testing (e.g., traceroute and ping) and HTTP object testing, with new support for ARM architectures, including Raspberry Pi.
- Simplified management with the ability to easily remove node instances directly from the UI portal.
RUM got faster, with better insights, better experiences
Real User Monitoring (RUM) continues to be a powerful tool for Internet Performance Monitoring, especially when used in conjunction with synthetics and other telemetry tools. In 2024 RUM got better by providing deeper insights into user experiences:
- Frustration metrics: Gain visibility into user frustration with metrics like error clicks, rage clicks, and dead clicks.
- INP tracking: Monitor Interaction to Next Paint (INP) for more accurate responsiveness metrics.
- Enhanced Smartboard: A revamped dashboard with richer visualizations for faster issue identification and resolution.
With these enhancements, businesses can get more visibility into how users are experiencing their web properties. There are more improvements to RUM around the corner, but we will save those for 2025.
A year of innovation, a future of resilience
The innovations we delivered in 2024 represent more than just new tools and capabilities. They reflect our laser focus on helping the world’s leading brands navigate the growing complexity of the Internet and deliver seamless digital experiences.
This investment in IPM innovation earned us a place as a Leader in Gartner’s first Magic Quadrant™ for Digital Experience Monitoring (DEM). This recognition validates the impact of our work and reflects the trust our customers place in Catchpoint to deliver the tools they need to succeed.
As we look to the future, we remain a team that is laser focused on redefining what’s possible in IPM, and helping businesses stay ahead in a world where digital experiences matter more than ever. Together, we’ll continue shaping the next chapter of Internet Resilience.
Watch the on-demand webinar hosted by our product team to learn all about the recent product and capability innovations to the Catchpoint IPM platform.
To close the year, we thank our customers, our team members, and our partners. We are honored to be on this journey with you and look forward to the new year.
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