How Endpoint Monitoring Saved My Life (Or At Least My Sanity)

Catchpoint makes parenting a saner sport! OK, that’s not the usual use case. But much as I know it sounds crazy, I used Endpoint Monitoring to explain to my 11-year-old gamer that I’m totally innocent. The reason she is having gaming lag and lost connections is not because of her parents’ poor home Wi-Fi or her old PC – and she doesn’t just have to take my word for it.

Here, let me explain.

Laggy Performance With Bed Wars

Like hundreds of thousands of parents around the world, I have a child who loves to play online games. She plays with her friends every chance she gets. Her current game of choice is on a Minecraft server called Hypixel (a server that hosts mini-games based on Microsoft’s Minecraft.)

Her favorite game is Bed Wars. Bed Wars is a frantic, high-energy game where players team up to try and defeat each other by destroying each other’s beds.

Stop yawning and don’t blanket me with questions (see what I did there?!). Trust me, this really has something to do with Catchpoint’s Endpoint Monitoring, I swear!

Well, for a few days now, she has been complaining that sometimes her game is “laggy,” meaning it’s slow or it doesn’t connect to the server. She keeps asking everyone in the house to get off the Wi-Fi or blames her “ancient PC,” as she calls it.

Being a techie, I suggest the usual tips: reboot, close tasks, switch from Wi-Fi to Ethernet. All of which she has tried. Unfortunately, the same random, inconsistent issue always reappears.

Endpoint Monitoring To The Rescue!

Finally, I suggest that she try installing Catchpoint Endpoint Monitoring on her PC. My intention is to prove to her that the issue isn’t with her PC or our home Wi-Fi, it’s something else. Naturally, being the pre-teen she is, she doesn’t believe me. Instead, she asks for a new network and a new computer (yeah, good luck with that.)

Eventually, with great drama, she agrees to let me install Catchpoint Endpoint Monitoring. I set up a test to the Hypixel server she is connecting to. I ask her for the server address. She obliges. I ask her if there is just one server or if there is more than one. She says they only have one server. I have done some research and know that Hypixel has millions of players all over the world and over 100,00 of them are concurrent, so they must have more than one server. But I keep that to myself for now.

The test is now set up to Hypixel and I tell her to carry on trying to play. I let her know I’ll be back in thirty minutes.

Thirty Minutes Later… The Test Results Are In

Thirty minutes pass, and I’ve built a dashboard for her. I go find her to show her the data.

First, I show her this.

I explain that what’s she’s seeing is her connection, via our ISP, to Hypixel. In the space of thirty minutes, we hit six different servers. She was surprised (and not just because Dad really knows stuff).

I then showed her this.

I explained that what she’s seeing reveals how fast our Internet is. 192.168.0.254 is our local gateway router, which all Wi-Fi traffic goes through, and it is responding in a good time.

As a Gamer, She Understands Ping

As she can see, the problem isn’t with our Wi-Fi. What’s more, as a gamer, she understands ping, so she does not dispute this.

Using the Endpoint Monitoring desktop app, I then test the bandwidth.

It’s not bad. Certainly, it’s good enough for her to be able to play. Definitely not bad enough for her to drop connections.

Now, the final piece: let’s see what’s going on with her PC.

So now I’ve proved to her that her father’s home IT setup isn’t the problem. Bam! Tech is so cool.

So, What Was The Problem?

Now I explain to her why there are multiple servers. It’s because Hypixel is using Cloudflare as their CDN.

Comparing the latency (round trip times) from the different Cloudflare servers (Fig 1 and Fig 2), most of them are at about 20ms, apart from one.

So now we know where the issue lies. What can we do to help?

I create a quick batch file for her, which flushes the system DNS. I put it on the desktop. This way, if it happens again, she can simply close her game, flush the DNS, and try once more.

Thanks To Catchpoint Endpoint Monitoring, We Lived Happily Ever After (Mostly)

I’m happy to say, this solution has worked for me when needed. Now I have a happy 11-year-old gamer who is also wiser about CDNs, endpoint monitoring, and how Catchpoint can help resolve performance issues.

Who knew Catchpoint would not only be a great place to work, but also provide an excellent way for me to bond with my kid?!

Want to know what Catchpoint can do for you? Get some quick video tips on Catchpoint’s Endpoint solution: