Blog post
Blog Post
Catchpoint Expands Observability Network to Barcelona: A Growing Internet Hub
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Catchpoint’s observability network has extended its footprint to the beautiful city of Barcelona, the second largest and most populated city in Spain. Barcelona is our third city in Spain, after Madrid and Seville.
Barcelona is a growing hub for Internet connectivity thanks to its strategic position in Southern Europe and its maritime port to the Mediterranean Sea. A combination of multiple carrier-neutral data centres (Equinix1 BA1, Atlas Edge, bitNAP, EdgeConneX, Edged, EXA, etc), two neutral Internet exchange points (CATNIX and DE-CIX Barcelona), access to submarine cable routes (2Africa, Medloop and Medusa), and the recently built open landing station Barcelona CLS make the city attractive to digital investments.
From Barcelona, there are a variety of terrestrial routes towards Bilbao (Marea, Greace Cooper, Anjana, TGN WER, etc.), Lisbon (ACE, WACS, EIG, SAT3, MainOne), Madrid and Central Europe, and to Atlantic France (Bordeaux) for extend further connectivity services.
Catchpoint offers a choice of two backbone node with Tier1 transit carriers:
- Arelion/Telia AS1299
- Cogent AS174
As opposed to other application performance monitoring solutions, our nodes are single-homed with those ISPs ensuring high levels of fidelity. For those with interest in measuring IPv6 application/network performance, we support IPv6 on both providers.
Why should you monitor from Barcelona?
- Second largest metropolitan area in Spain with about 5 million people.
- World-class business destination with top industry events like Mobile World Congress, Gartner Symposium BCN, etc.
- CDNs and Content providers such as Meta, Microsoft, Google, Cloudflare, Akamai, Imperva have network PoPs in Barcelona.
- Monitor potential network disturbances on Internet backbone with Tier 1 providers Arelion and Cogent.
- Direct Internet routes to Africa (Lagos, Johannesburg, Nairobi) using different submarine cables.
- Alternative Internet routes to Europe (Paris, Amsterdam, Frankfurt, Milan) via terrestrial cables.
Why is this important?
Because the Internet is complex and changing all the time. The world is now digital, and user connectivity (for workforce, customers, partners, etc.) is the lifeblood of most digital processes.
It is not enough to look at a system and know that your cluster and databases are working well.
What really matters is how users are experiencing your application.
The visibility from a cloud datacenter, likely outside a major metro area with great connectivity, is not representative of the experience your users might have on a wireless network in the Barcelona Metro, or a team member in an office in the Zona Franca. There are multiple connectivity, routing, latency, configuration, and third-party elements that could impact users in different scenarios.
If user experience matters, monitoring the real-world user experience matters.
Expanding our global observability network
September was a busy month. We added a total of 39 nodes to our global observability network:
- 24 in Europe
- 8 in Asia-Pacific
- 3 in North America
- 4 in South America
By country, we deepen our footprint in Scotland/UK, France, Spain, Japan, Canada, Brazil, Chile, Australia, Sweden, Czech Republic, Austria and India.
Our September growth figures are representative of our ever-expanding observability network. At the beginning of August, we were covering 98 countries, just over 2 months later we are covering 106 countries with 2,832 vantage points including cloud, backbone, last mile, wireless nodes plus BGP peers. As we get closer to 3,000, we continue making investments to provide by far the most comprehensive perspective of Internet performance in the industry.
Meet Catchpoint in Barcelona
If you happen to be in Barcelona for Gartner IT Symposium/Xpo this 4-7 November, stop by our booth to say ‘hi.’ We might have some very cool news to share.
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