Catchpoint Fall 2011 Release

Catchpoint is proud to announce the rollout of our latest platform release. This release provides our customers with even more ways to monitor, analyze, and act on information than ever before.

Here are some of the key features:

Chrome Browser:

Catchpoint users can now use the Chrome agent, which relies on Chrome 15.0, to monitor their webpages. Since its launch, Chrome has become a popular browser, capturing 20% of the market with rapid adoption predicted to continue. The browser has brought several innovations, one of the most important being the SPDY protocol.

Host Charting:

One of the biggest challenges with monitoring a webpage is understanding the impact of the different hosts in the page over time. Now Catchpoint allows you to collect and analyze the performance of individual hostnames over time.

The feature allows our customers to look at various metrics including DNS, Connect, Wait, Load, Response, Webpage Response, #Items, etc per Hostname. All these metrics will allow them to understand the impact of the host(s) and the trends over time. User are able to look at all the statistical values like median, geometrical mean, standard deviation, 75/80/95/99th percentile, etc.

Example: Performance of 2 hosts on Shopzilla.com & number of requests.

Zone Charting: Keep an eye on 3rd parties.

Over the last decade webpages have become more and more complex relying on myriads of vendors to bring more value to the users and generate additional revenue for websites. This complexity has created the need for a better understanding of the impact of the various groups of third parties.

Catchpoint allows our customers to categorize requests into a “Zone” based on hostname, path, entire URL, or the IP address (range).  The zones can overlap, a request can belong to more than a zone.  Users will be able to chart several key metrics for the various zones across the tests enabled with Zone data collection. As part of this feature we launching Catchpoint managed Zones for key vendors categories like Ads, Widgets, etc.

Example: Performance of 2 Zones based on a Shopzilla web test.

Bottleneck Time: What was the impact of a Host or a Zone on the overall performance of the page?

Since the launch of Catchpoint we included “Bottleneck Time” in the waterfall charts in order to understand who are the performance culprits. Bottleneck time shows the periods of time where a given host was the only one utilizing the network. It helps understand the impact of a given host. With the new release we are making available “Bottleneck Time” and “% Bottleneck” for Host and Zone charting, based on the requests loaded up to the Document Complete event. The “% Bottleneck” will provide you with insight into what % of the Document Complete time was taken up by a given host(s) or Zone(s).

Example: BottleNeck time breakdown by host for Amazon.com.

“Last Mile” Pilot Program:

Performance monitoring is like peeling an Onion. It is very important to watch and understand all the various layers and monitor from as many vantage points as possible, including actual end users. This is why from the beginning we built solutions like Catchpoint Glimpse (Real User Monitoring) and Insight.

We have launched a small pilot Last Mile program in the US.  Catchpoint users can run tests on the last mile agents located in Los Angeles, San Francisco, Boston and New York. These Last Mile agents are running on consumer ISPs – TimeWarner, Comcast, ATT Uverse, and Verizon FIOS & DSL.

We are already back to work on the next release… look for more surprises under the tree…

The Catchpoint Team