How-To: Filter Out the “Noise” With Zones and Hosts – A Catchpoint Differentiator

Efficient root cause analysis is vital to incident management. How quickly an issue can be understood determines the mean time to resolve (MTTR), which directly impacts the digital experience. When there is a sudden outage or a performance degradation, root cause analysis can become laborious given the complexity of all the components involved and the potentially huge amount of observability data generated from different sources.

You may have multiple monitoring tests with targeted alerts that give you visibility into every layer of the application but without the right analytics capabilities, all the data is just noise. During an incident, it is not enough to simply have access to performance data. A quick resolution requires the ability to interpret that data as logically and easily as possible.

Filter Out the "Noise" with Zones and Hosts

The Catchpoint platform has advanced intuitive data analytics and visualization, which enable faster incident resolution. These features make it easier to cut through the "noise" associated with big data and focus on the information that matters.

In this blog post, we spotlight the recent “How-To” video on the Zones and Hosts feature, an integral and important aspect of Catchpoint’s data analytics capabilities. Zones and Hosts set Catchpoint apart from all other DEM vendors. These powerful analytic capabilities will get you to root cause quickly by allowing you to cut out the "noise".

What Are Zones?

The Catchpoint platform allows categorizing requests into a “Zone” based on the hostname, path, entire URL, or the IP address (range). You can also create Custom Zones using regex. Configuring Zones with Regex allows you to chart several key metrics for the various zones across different tests.

What Are Hosts?

One of the biggest challenges with monitoring a webpage is understanding the impact of the different hosts on the page over time. With our Host feature, you can analyze the performance of individual host names over time. This powerful feature allows you to look at a wide range of metrics, including DNS, Connect, Wait, Load, Response, etc. for every single hostname. All these metrics will allow you to understand the impact of the host(s) and any trends over time.

Why Should You Configure Zones and Hosts?

Zones and Hosts save time when triaging an issue or troubleshooting a poor-performing webpage or application. These are two major Catchpoint differentiators that offer powerful insights while troubleshooting complex issues.

Fundamentally, what Zones and Hosts bring to the table is the ability to weed through large volumes of data by segmenting it into different buckets. Quickly determine if an issue is caused by a third-party service, and if it is specific to a domain or a group of requests. Segmenting the data in this way will also help you to track trends over time to see if the incident is a one-time occurrence or a chronic issue.

In today’s featured “How-To” video, we offer some insights into best practices when it comes to using these features. You will learn –

·        How to set up Zones and Hosts.

·        The different Zone types – self, third-party, and custom – and how to use them.

·        How to analyze and correlate Zone and Hosts data.

Let's hop in!