Advancing Application Monitoring: Introducing Catchpoint Tracing

In an era where “cloud-native” has become synonymous with complexity and distribution, the world of application monitoring faces a profound challenge.  

We’re at a point where a single user action, as innocuous as ordering a pizza from their app, triggers a cascade of calls and requests on the backend, journeying through stages like API gateway validation, authentication, product availability confirmation, shopping cart and checkout processing, payment validation, order preparation, and delivery logistics. Now multiply this single action by the number of actions taken against applications in a given day. The result is nothing short of mind-boggling. It's a marvel that applications manage to function at all.  

The Solution: Tracing the journey  

This challenge is not just a hurdle; it's the Everest of modern software development, a call to the industry for something better. That’s why we recently enhanced our Internet Performance Monitoring (IPM) platform with Catchpoint Tracing. This new capability solves the problem of complex, large, volatile environments – used for modern application delivery – impacting your customer’s digital experience and, ultimately, business revenue.  

Why Catchpoint Tracing is a game changer

Catchpoint Tracing enables end-to-end monitoring of distributed applications no matter where they are deployed – on physical devices, virtual machines, and containers. It provides granular insights into all interactions between services and associated resources like databases, caches, queues, streams, and more. This data wealth enables you to analyze resource usage, troubleshoot issues, and debug applications rapidly.  

Unlike tools that emerged before the rise of cloud, Tracing originated as cloud native became synonymous with complex and distributed applications. These modern application architectures presented new problems to solve and drove the need for an end-to-end understanding of applications to efficiently troubleshoot and maintain high levels of performance. In this evolution, Catchpoint developed an entirely new way to monitor applications, removing the need for multiple tools while dramatically simplifying complexity.  

Catchpoint Tracing is the first and only platform that offers true end-to-end management and visibility of distributed applications, spanning from the user's experience all the way to the backend.  

What does "end-to-end" truly mean?  

It means we start with a direct, outside-in approach only possible with IPM. We allow teams to directly observe the relationship of IPM’s capabilities with application capabilities. This makes it possible to understand and manage the aggregate set of distributed services an application consumes, right down to the line level of the runtime code for every local service or container-based application.  

If you're an IT Ops professional entrusted with delivering flawless user experiences rooted in your business applications, responsible for managing cross-boundary relationships or grappling with operational inefficiencies, then Catchpoint Tracing will help you be better at what you do.  

Four critical problems solved by Catchpoint Tracing  

1. Visibility: Incident management & troubleshooting failures

In any application call, numerous backend request calls (often dozens or more) can be triggered. Each of these calls represents a potential point of failure, such as an expired certificate. IT Ops teams require the ability to swiftly troubleshoot these failed requests before they impact the business. Catchpoint Tracing streamlines this process, eliminating the time wasted pinpointing failure points. With Catchpoint Tracing, teams can easily understand dependencies, assess the impact of migrations or app updates, identify components to pause, and which section of the app is in incident (versus just saying ‘it’s the code’).  

2. Balance: Achieving harmony between innovation and reliability

When businesses require developers to push innovative features that break the apps IT Ops are responsible for keeping up, Catchpoint Tracing will improve their relationship to find balance. It aids in breaking down silos, reduces finger-pointing, and helps foster a blameless culture by managing the “dev versus ops” relationship. With Catchpoint Tracing, especially when paired with SLO Tracker, IT Ops teams gain valuable insights to deliver resilient, fast customer experiences because applications will no longer be a black box. Essentially, IT Ops will be able to investigate application issues even though they are not developers.  

3. Performance: Application performance optimization

In an age where slow is the new down, fast application performance translates to better business performance. Catchpoint Tracing empowers IT Ops to assess the multitude of factors influencing an application's performance. Traditionally, application performance primarily fell under the developers' domain. However, with Catchpoint Tracing, IT Ops teams can proficiently delve into performance issues without requiring developer expertise.  

4. Efficiency: Navigating ecosystems and portable telemetry

IT Ops teams need the ability to support multiple protocols to support their modern observability frameworks. Unfortunately, the sheer volume, variety, and velocity at which they receive monitoring data can be overwhelming, underscoring the need for robust observability frameworks. Given that most user experience issues surface at the front end, the demand for IPM will continue to rise. However, its success hinges on adopting standards like OpenTelemetry (OTEL) as a vital part of the IT arsenal. With Catchpoint Tracing and OTEL, IT Ops teams can own their data, breaking free from proprietary lock-ins and gaining the flexibility required in today's dynamic computing landscape.  

Unlock end-to-end user experience excellence with Catchpoint Tracing

For businesses that prioritize the user experience above all else, Catchpoint is the world's only vendor offering IPM that extends all the way to revenue and productivity-generating applications. The fusion of application tracing with exclusive Internet Stack visibility, a unique offering of IPM, equips you to deliver resilient, fast user experiences effortlessly and with unwavering confidence.  

Learn more:

• Take a guided tour to see Catchpoint Tracing at work
• Read our guide to learn more about Distributed Tracing
• Download our Platform Overview Solution Brief