Catchpoint Reviews

Name: Catchpoint
Brand: Catchpoint
Rating: 4 (12 reviews)

4.1 out of 5

12 reviews
100% willing to recommend

2,628 followers

What is Catchpoint?UNIXBusinessApplication
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Catchpoint is the Internet Resilience Company™. The top online retailers, Global2000, CDNs, cloud service providers, and xSPs in the world rely on Catchpoint to increase their resilience by catching any issues in the Internet Stack before they impact their business. Catchpoint’s Internet Performance Monitoring (IPM) suite offers synthetics, RUM, performance optimization, high fidelity data and flexible visualizations with advanced analytics. It leverages thousands of global vantage points (including inside wireless networks, BGP, backbone, last mile, endpoint, enterprise, ISPs, and more) to provide unparalleled observability into anything that impacts your customers, workforce, networks, website performance, applications, and APIs.

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Catchpoint is the #5 ranked solution in top Digital Experience Monitoring (DEM) solutions, #20 ranked solution in APM tools, and #31 ranked solution in best Network Monitoring Tools. PeerSpot users give Catchpoint an average rating of 8.2 out of 10. Catchpoint is most commonly compared to Splunk Enterprise Security: Catchpoint vs Splunk Enterprise Security. Catchpoint is popular among the midsize enterprise segment, accounting for 57% of users researching this solution on PeerSpot. The top industry researching this solution are professionals from a educational organization, accounting for 56% of all views.

Helped 769,334 peers since 2012

Featured reviews

Carl Funk

Senior Manager at a training & coaching company with 10,001+ employees

Aug 12, 2022

There's still too much manual involvement in getting customized test configurations out there. It's good, but it still takes a lot of effort. In other words, it's when you need to configure it to collect a specific variable and that kind of thing. The other issue is the cost. The more data you collect, the more expensive it becomes. You sell your organization by saying we can get this feature set, but then you have to walk that back because we'll need more money to run every test. This is something hard to get out in your initial scoping. You provide Catchpoint with a series of tests and get a cost estimate, not realizing all the data you might have to collect long term. That was a big deal for us because we partly switched on the promise of saving money.

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Pandiarajan G

Quality Assurance Automation Lead at a comms service provider with 10,001+ employees

Aug 26, 2022

Catchpoint has placed backbone nodes in different locations. There is a page called the nodes' status page where you can check the status of the nodes. The challenge we have faced is that sometimes our backbone nodes go down due to some technical issue, it could be due to the carriers or the vendors, we have to go to that page and subscribe to that location. We have asked Catchpoint to provide us with notifications through API so that we don't have to manually go and see the page to make the changes to the script. By providing this notification automatically through API, we can switch the nodes. Currently, Catchpoint is migrating to a new user interface. My colleagues and I feel that the old user version was better, it was more user-friendly. For example, the new user interface does not allow you to resize certain resolutions.

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Akshay Manchalwar

Technical Support Engineer at Cybage Software

Apr 16, 2024

We use Catchpoint to monitor our websites in real-time. It helps us keep track of various metrics. Catchpoint is very flexible and also provides logs for troubleshooting purposes. It helps us fix issues within the SLAs signed with the end users. The tool is easy to learn. It would be great if…

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Valuable Features

Catchpoint's most valuable features are its customer service and support, as well as its ability to record sessions and test transaction types. The new user interface has also been praised for its numerous new features and functionalities.

The drill-down feature is highly effective in identifying specific issues on the site. The solution allows for data slicing in various ways, including metrics, time, and city. The creation of response headers and the ability to compare values to logs is also appreciated. The frequent alerts and notifications are a standout feature, providing valuable information about market issues.

The well-designed UI and external integration capabilities were major selling points.

Room for Improvement

Improvements needed for Catchpoint include focusing solely on network monitoring instead of trying to cover the full stack of other computers like Datadog, New Relic, and Dynatrace. The old process of providing a base point for monitoring is not cost-effective compared to more affordable options like pin down.

Catchpoint should assess its strategy and improve brand marketing to make customers more aware of the latest version. The placement of backbone nodes in different locations is beneficial, yet there should be notifications through API to automatically switch nodes when they go down.

The new user interface is less user-friendly and lacks certain features like resizing resolutions. The script creation feature should be simplified and made less complicated.

Testing reliability in China and the Middle East is challenging, and better documentation and online indexing, including ratings of different ISPs, would be helpful.

The online recorder add-on to Chrome for recording transaction tests could be improved to fix bugs.

Detailed waterfalls and robust metrics should be accessible through client links.

Catchpoint lacks an automated page updating feature, requiring manual refreshes every five minutes. There is too much manual involvement in configuring test setups, and the cost increases with more data collection. Catchpoint should improve the ability to display downtime on a status page and provide an API for creating monitors to facilitate automation.

ROI

The implementation of Catchpoint resulted in significant improvements and optimizations for the company. The transition from the previous solution and integration was viewed holistically, with the recognition that without these optimizations, problems would arise.

Catchpoint allowed for faster deployment of tests compared to previous solutions, with a 25% to 30% increase in speed. Although the test-writing language for complex cases needed improvement, it still surpassed what was previously available.

The ability to detect whether issues were caused by the provider or the company itself was invaluable, as it couldn't be automated before. This capability provided a considerable return on investment, allowing for efficient triaging and real-time troubleshooting. The ability to definitively determine if an issue was on the customer's end helped in resolving concerns. Additionally, the capacity to identify issues regionally, nationally, and globally was seen as an unbelievable return on investment.

Pricing

The pricing for Catchpoint is on a point scale based on consumption. The cost is determined by the type and amount of data extracted from each test. The pricing model is transparent and there are no hidden fees. However, the pricing is considered expensive, especially for smaller contracts. Larger contracts receive volume discounts.

The licensing fees for Catchpoint are slightly higher compared to other tools that offer similar functionality at a lower cost. Catchpoint is positioned as a tool for large enterprises with a higher budget.

"The solution's pricing is comparable to the last tool we were using."
"The pricing is based on consumption and works on a point scale. For example, let's say I want to look at www.google.com, and I'm going to test it to see if it's there. It will bring back all this data that tells me how long it took to connect and how long it took to get the first byte. It will list all the resources on the page, showing that they all work and there are no broken links.It brings that data back. That test has an assigned point value depending on what you decide to extract from that test. If all I do is check to see whether it's available, it might be one point. I don't know the exact point values off-hand. This is just an example."
"In terms of licensing fees, I believe they were slightly higher."

Popular Use Cases

The primary use cases of Catchpoint include:

End vision monitoring with an endpoint solution
Creating network status and focusing on synthetic monitoring
As a marketing tool
Monitoring the shopping element of partner sites
Testing versions of international websites for clients
Monitoring online shopping customers and supporting global customers
Synthetic testing of API and URL endpoints
Ensuring customer journey monitoring from a user-experience standpoint
Using the solution as API monitoring by validating API responses and performance metrics

Service and Support

Catchpoint's customer service and support are very good. They have a professional service team that offers assistance with scripting and other functionalities. The network team provides dedicated support 24/7 for any issues related to geolocations or network problems. The integrated help desk chat is responsive, although it may lack expert knowledge.

Fast escalations to engineers are available when needed, and issues are resolved promptly. Users appreciate the separate team dedicated to addressing Catchpoint issues and their quick response. Users find Catchpoint support easy to work with and appreciate the direct communication channels, including with the CEO.

Deployment

The initial setup for Catchpoint is described as easy, straightforward, and not complex. The availability of manuals and documentation makes it easy to set up. The scripting part is also mentioned to have all the necessary functionalities and development already provided.

The deployment process may vary, however, some users mention Catchpoint was up and running within a day.

Catchpoint is rated highly for ease of deployment.

Scalability

The scalability of Catchpoint's solution is excellent. The solution is described as easy to scale and it is emphasized that Catchpoint is a scalable solution.

It is mentioned that Catchpoint has acquired a significant number of data centers across the United States, indicating its ability to handle a large volume of users.

However, there is a slight concern regarding scalability when deploying one's own node in their environment, as it requires manual configuration and load distribution may not be optimized.

Stability

Users consistently express positive opinions about the stability of the Catchpoint solution. They rate the stability highly. Users mention that they have been using the solution for a significant period of time, particularly the past year, and have found it to be stable and reliable.

They also appreciate the continuous updates and patches released by the company to address any concerns or difficulties encountered during testing, transactions, and API usage.

These insights are based on the in-depth reviews provided by peers to help you make a better buying decision.

Download our Catchpoint Buyer's Guide for additional reliable information.