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Catchpoint In the News – November 2021: The One Where We Expand Edge Observability and It’s Google’s Turn to Go Dark
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In the News: November 2021
The drumbeat of incident reviews continued, with not one, but two analytical articles from Catchpoint experts. This month, it was Google’s turn for the spotlight, as Google Cloud experienced outages across several of its products and websites crashed for many Google Cloud customers, from Spotify to Priceline.
Meanwhile, Catchpoint CMO Nik Koutsoukos’ article in DevOps.com tackled the topic of observability and why it matters. The problem is, many technologists think of observability in too-narrow terms. Monitoring a single domain, or linking observability to application performance management, for instance, misses the mark.
As Koutsoukos points out,
“Observability that ignores the outcome begins and ends with the application environment is nowhere near sufficient. We need to expand our sense of observability, begin with the user experience, and encompass every link in the chain of the end-to-end digital business. When we do, we create a much more holistic, useful, and actionable picture of the health of our digital systems. And we can make sure we’re continually monitoring digital performance in the way that matters most: As experienced by users. “
Announcing Argo for Spectrum
November 23, 2021 | Cloudflare blog
A recent blog post from Cloudflare announced Argo for Spectrum: a solution designed to reduce latency and packet loss while improving connectivity for TCP applications. To illustrate the improvement, Cloudflare built a test case and used Catchpoint as an objective third-party vendor to run a set of benchmark tests.
Note that this process of testing out digital products before they go live is something many of our customers can take advantage of. It’s a great way to ensure a launch is both flawless and achieving the goals you are looking for.
"Shop ‘Til You Drop" Could Take on New Meaning in Online Black Friday Sales
November 23, 2021| APM Digest
Online shopping has skyrocketed, and judging by 2020’s activity, the surge in holiday spending will only add rocket fuel. However, online shoppers are fickle. Faced with slow websites or apps, they’ll just click over to a competitor’s site.
As Karthik Suresh, manager of professional services at Catchpoint, points out, such high expectations make the ability to deliver a flawless digital experience vital to retail success.
“Meeting user expectations requires supporting device and network diversity,” Karthik notes in the article. “It necessitates proactive detecting, identifying and validating user and application reachability, availability, performance and reliability across an increasingly complex digital delivery chain.”
Catchpoint Supports Active Observability for MEC and AWS Wavelength
November 22, 2021 | The Fast Mode
The Fast Mode covered Catchpoint’s recently announced industry-leading support for the active observability of mobile edge compute and AWS Wavelength zones. The article analyzes the value of these new edge observability data sources.
As the article notes, such new data sources will allow DevOps, site reliability, platform engineers, and other monitoring strategists to gain a new level of insight into the performance and reliability of edge delivery services, without the variability of over-the-air noise ratios. This will help drive new 5G mobile edge-enabled business innovations, such as:
- Rich content delivery for wireless infrastructure stadiums
- Remote compute for low-power IoT devices
- The ability to stream smooth content to global audiences or lag-free games for the most demanding experiences.
On-prem-as-a-Service Comes Into Its Own During Pandemic
November 22, 2021 | Data Center Knowledge
Not every company can move all its systems into the cloud. At the same time, running an on-premises data center may not make sense, either. That’s where on-prem-as-a-service offerings can help.
A recent article from Data Center Knowledge outlined the key reasons behind the increased profile of this service, in which the hardware is owned by the provider, who also handles all the installation, maintenance, networking, and other aspects of running a data center. Catchpoint CMO Nik Koutsoukos is extensively quoted on the value of this approach and why it is important to our customers.
Incident Review: Google Cloud Outage
November 21, 2021 | DZone
DZone published an in-depth incident review, first published on our blog. Catchpoint Chief Product and Technology Officer, Dritan Suljoti, explored an outage that hit Google Cloud on November 16, 2021, and inflicted significant collateral damage on many companies that use the service for website hosting. Companies such as Nest, 1800Flowers, CNET, Home Depot, Etsy, Priceline, Spotify, and Google itself were all impacted by the outage.
The outage lasted almost two hours. Web pages weren’t the only affected area, as multiple Google Cloud products were also impacted.
Google blamed the outage on, “a latent bug in a network configuration service which was triggered during a leader election charge.” That said, the incident illustrated the need for companies to implement objective observability frameworks.
As Suljoti pointed out,
“With the massive adoption of public cloud, this latest incident (in a long year of outages) illustrates how significant the impact a public cloud vendor outage can be downstream. It also illustrates how vulnerable enterprises are to third-party vendor outages.”
Catchpoint Announces Active Observers for Mobile Edge Compute and AWS Wavelength
November 17, 2021 | APM Digest
APM Digest also covered Catchpoint’s announcement of active observability data sources for mobile edge compute and AWS Wavelength. Strategically placed at the mobile carrier edge, these new data sources will expand access to valuable baselining, benchmarking, and monitoring data.
As Catchpoint CEO Mehdi Daoudi noted in the article, mobile edge and 5G are transforming the mobile internet experience for consumers and businesses.
“With our new observational data sources, service and application providers will get the trust and confidence they need to protect their brand and business investments. And IT technologists will get the reliability and innovation capabilities they demand to deliver amazing digital experiences in ways only now possible because of the 5G mobile edge.”
Observability Matters. But Are You Observing the Right Things?
November 11, 2021 | DevOps.com
This DevOps.com article from Catchpoint CMO Nik Koutsoukos tackles the thorny question of what observability is and why it matters. As he notes, most people don’t really understand what observability means and use too narrow a lens when they talk about what it does.
Observability is not synonymous with application performance monitoring, for example. Knowing the health of your application environment is one thing, but you also need to understand the health of your overall digital assets as experienced by users.
As the article says, “To get the full picture of the health and performance of your digital assets, you should be tracking outputs from across the end-to-end digital service chain.”
Lessons From an Internet Outage: Issues Caused by Let’s Encrypt DST Root CA X3 Expiration
November 6, 2021| DZone
DZone published another Catchpoint incident review that first appeared on our blog. This incident had an impact on Catchpoint itself (as well as many other companies) with the expiration of a Let's Encrypt DST Root CA X3 on September 29, 2021.
Written by Sergey Katsev, Vice President of Engineering at Catchpoint, the piece a detailed explanation of lessons learned and how to solve the problem on the server side. He notes,
“As the owner of that service, you have the solution within your control on the server-side, so it is upon you to fix it.”
50 BEST APM Tools: Application Performance Monitoring Tools
November 1, 2021| Guru 99
Last but not least, the tech experts at Guru99 outlined the key features of the 50 best application performance management tools, including Catchpoint solutions. The extensive list included both open source and commercial software.
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