Achieve resilience with Internet Performance Monitoring (IPM)

Internet Performance Monitoring (IPM) is a new generation of solutions that provide deep visibility into every aspect of the Internet that impacts your business and revenue.  

Catchpoint, arguably the first IPM platform, designed IPM as a purpose-built set of capabilities to meet the needs of the modern digital landscape which no longer revolves around localized networks. Instead, it relies on a complex web of interconnected systems that must seamlessly collaborate in real-time. This intricate network, which we’ve coined the Internet Stack, demands continuous monitoring, management, and optimization to meet the evolving needs of businesses.  

IPM distinguishes itself from traditional monitoring solutions by offering comprehensive visibility across the entire Internet Stack. By providing deep insights into network performance, application behavior, and user experience, IPM empowers businesses to proactively identify and mitigate potential issues before they impact operations or customer satisfaction.

The Internet Stack is composed of all the components that form an organization's service delivery path from their applications to the end users. It includes fundamental infrastructure such as routers, firewalls, and ISPs, and extends to include core elements like BGP, DNS, CDNs, SASE, and MQTT. Also integral to the Internet Stack are various vendors and services like website payment providers, analytics engines, video hosting, and third-party libraries. Learn more about the Internet Stack ->

Almost every study examining the hourly cost of outages invariably leads to a clear and undeniable conclusion: outages are expensive.

According to a 2016 study, the average cost of downtime was estimated at approximately $9,000 per minute. In a 2023 study by Forrester Consulting, 61% of respondents stated that outages cost them at least $100,000, with 32% indicating costs of at least $500,000 and 21% reporting expenses of at least $1 million per hour of downtime.

There is a direct link between early detection and Internet Resilience. When outages cost you tens of thousands of dollars each minute, proactive monitoring to detect them as early as possible is crucial.

Each of the pillars below is crucial in enabling Internet Resilience and seamless customer experience:

‍Reachability: The starting point of digital interaction is ensuring that user requests make it to your server without a hitch, setting the initial tone for the user experience. 

‍Availability: True availability extends beyond an "HTTP 200 OK" response; it involves ensuring all functionalities of an application are working as intended. For example, if an eCommerce site's images or descriptions fail to load, it's not fully available to the user. 

‍Performance: This pillar focuses on the speed and responsiveness of your application. It’s about benchmarking your performance against industry leaders to provide a competitive user experience. 

‍Reliability: The hallmark of reliability is the application's ability to consistently deliver on reachability, availability, and performance, ensuring all users receive a uniform experience, no matter the circumstances. 

At its core, IPM leverages Synthetic and Internet Synthetic monitoring and real user monitoring (RUM) to provide insights into both simulated and actual user experiences. IPM also combines advanced tools like Internet Sonar and BGP monitoring, which offer global insights into Internet health and optimize routing and reachability.  

Adding to this robust framework, IPM includes Tracing, which delves into the application layer to illuminate the path of user interactions and identify performance impediments. Catchpoint WebPageTest (WPT) is deployed for its unparalleled ability to analyze and enhance website speed and user experience, catering specifically to the needs of Front-End, WebOps, and QA teams.  

Furthermore, Endpoint Monitoring offers insights into device and network performance, essential for ensuring a smooth hybrid work experience and swift troubleshooting.

By combining these tools and approaches, Catchpoint delivers 5 IPM solutions, all on one comprehensive platform: Customer Experience, Network Experience, Application Experience, Workforce Experience, and Website Experience.

Key visualization capabilities in the Catchpoint portal powered by our data analytics framework, Orchestra, include Experience Scores, Dashboards, Smartboards, Earth View, Explorer, and custom visualizations. Learn more about our platform ->

Additionally, you can use our product integrations, REST APIs, and Webhooks to use your data in other tools, solutions and platforms.

Catchpoint’s IPM platform is fed data from the world’s largest independent network of vantage points.

This global observability network leverages over 2600 vantage points, including nodes inside wireless networks, BGP, backbone, last mile, endpoint, enterprise, ISPs and more. It is constantly growing, and new nodes are added on a monthly basis. Get our Global Observability Network Solution Brief to learn more about Catchpoint’s network of vantage points.

All Catchpoint monitoring infrastructure is hosted in top tier data center facilities around the globe (TIER III or IV). This ensures the highest levels of availability (four 9s guaranteed availability). All U.S. monitoring locations are hosted in Equinix data centers. In addition, Catchpoint deploys dedicated, single-homed connections to TIER I carriers that are the primary transit or backbone providers in each location/region.

In contrast, other vendors “share” multi-homed connections to lower-tier providers in order to minimize costs. Unfortunately, these lower costs typically come at the expense of measurement quality and reliability. Using shared, multi-homed, lower-tier connections means a lack of routing control, which makes benchmarking very difficult; i.e. you can’t benchmark the performance of specific ISP routes between a location and a service as you are not in control of the routing between them.

The bottom line: when it comes to the quality of monitoring locations, you truly get what you pay for.

Unlike APM, which focuses on the performance of applications, IPM extends its reach to the entire Internet infrastructure. It monitors from the end-user perspective, taking into account connections to ISPs, CDNs, DNS resolution, and the health of the underlying network that supports application delivery. While APM tools focus on code, IPM focuses on the network and everything that impacts the customer and application experience over the Internet.  

‍Key differentiators of IPM:

‍Comprehensive Internet Stack Monitoring: Unlike traditional approaches that focus on the application layer, IPM offers visibility into the entire Internet Stack. It provides a holistic view of distributed and complex architectures, enabling proactive management and insight into how changes affect user experience. This is critical not just for the protocols we use but also for understanding the impact of third-party services that play a role in user experiences.  

‍End-User Perspective Monitoring: IPM emphasizes the importance of user experience by monitoring from the end-user's viewpoint. This approach ensures that you're not just seeing a 'green' status on your systems, but also confirming that users from various locations and using different resources can connect without issues. It's about monitoring what's important to users, which directly affects how they perceive your network's performance and reliability.  

‍Diverse Connection Type Monitoring: With IPM, monitoring is not limited to a single type of connection. It covers various ISPs and connection types like transit, eyeball, backbone, and multi-access, reflecting true user conditions. This diversity is crucial for resilience and flexibility, adapting to current and future monitoring needs.  

‍Real-time BGP Monitoring: IPM often includes real-time monitoring of BGP (Border Gateway Protocol) to minimize the impact of Internet events on connectivity and reachability. This capability is rare in commercial products and is essential for tasks like traffic shaping, vendor management, and troubleshooting connectivity issues when internal indicators show no problems.  

‍Detailed DNS Resolution Monitoring: DNS is fundamental to the internet, and IPM's ability to monitor DNS resolution hierarchies comprehensively is a key differentiator. With IPM tools like Catchpoint, you can monitor the entire DNS resolution chain, which is crucial for maintaining a positive digital presence and managing one of the Internet's key protocols, whether you host your DNS or rely on a third party. This enables specific and targeted actions, such as performance regression analysis on secondary level resolution or alerts for unexpected IP resolutions.

APM and IPM focus on different things. Many companies use APM to maintain the efficiency of their application stack, while employing IPM to monitor and enhance the performance of their Internet Stack. By using both, businesses can achieve a more holistic view of their overall digital ecosystem. The key to successfully implementing these tools lies in understanding specific business requirements and tailoring the monitoring strategy to meet those needs.

Together, APM and IPM provide a more complete and nuanced understanding of a system's performance, allowing for more effective troubleshooting and optimization. Learn more about IPM vs APM ->

For expert advice on IPM, read our Mastering IPM blog series. This resource provides in-depth insights on monitoring from the user's perspective, the fundamentals of Internet Resilience, effective SLI/SLO tracking, creating actionable insights with custom dashboards, and the intricacies of API monitoring.