iSeatz

Based on a supplier’s recommendation, Warshawski evaluated Catchpoint’s Real User Monitoring (RUM) and active observability solutions. “I like that Catchpoint allows us to add monitoring layers and enables us to understand how users are experiencing our platform,” he says.  Now the entire Cloud Operations team – DevOps, security, release management, and site reliability engineers – use Catchpoint. The Cloud Operations team is a major contributor for iSeatz meeting its SLAs and the first line of defense when something goes wrong, managing and escalating incidents. Through Catchpoint alerts, the teams can stay atop system uptime and performance, and satisfy Warshawski’s desire that they not just meet SLAs but overdeliver.

Troubleshooting every failure

With Catchpoint, iSeatz understands the actual end user experience globally instead of relying on what its testers and engineers in various regions can see. According to Warshawski, the ability to record tests and the waterfall feature are incredibly valuable Catchpoint features.

“We can record parts of tests much faster. Plus, the waterfall provides a token that allows us to dig into our logs and other monitoring tools to trace a request from start to finish. We lacked this capability before but can now easily troubleshoot every failure,” Warshawski says.

The Cloud Operations team is alerted when something goes wrong according to synthetic tests. “We integrate with partners, suppliers and vendors, and when a higher failure rate or latency originates from one of them, we want to catch it, escalate it, and resolve it as soon as possible,” continues Warshawski. Using Catchpoint, iSeatz can do just that. In the past, the Cloud Operations team had to somehow replicate such issues. This could be challenging, requiring lots of trial and error and digging into multiple tools to pinpoint problems. “The Catchpoint filmstrip shows the time to load a test and all associated images, making it far easier to find errors and pinpoint potential reasons,” Warshawski says. For example, if a third-party asset times out or takes too long to load, iSeatz can sort by time and response code in the Catchpoint waterfall view.

Validating CDN performance

iSeatz takes pride in delivering an excellent digital experience on behalf of its brand partners. To do so, it must account for many moving parts – including numerous ones beyond its control. Beyond page load times, JavaScript errors, and third-party asset performance, this includes CDNs.

Warshawski underscores that CDNs don’t behave the same around the world. “Every region uses a different edge, making it complicated to test. By setting up Catchpoint nodes in different locations where our customers exist, we can evaluate performance and take action such as spin up a new environment,” says Warshawski.

Understanding the end-to-end experience

While the SLA and Cloud Operations teams analyze performance when infrastructure changes are made, Cloud Operations and software engineering share responsibility for analyzing the performance of the code changes. “We believe each engineer has a responsibility for understanding how their changes impact our platform. With Catchpoint, they can conduct spot tests and understand the impact from the development cycle all the way to users,” continues

Warshawski. Moreover, iSeatz can integrate Catchpoint solutions with other key tools to enable robust monitoring. Due to the synergies between Catchpoint and other applications used by the Cloud Operations team, iSeatz gains enhanced alerting and easy access to additional data for investigating potential issues.

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