Catchpoint Reviews

My main use case for Catchpoint is external website monitoring.

I use external website monitoring with Catchpoint in my company by checking whether websites are reachable from certain countries and what the performance of the websites is from those countries.

In my opinion, the best features that Catchpoint offers are the regions from which monitoring is done and the graphical overview of the data.

The specific advantages I see in the fact that Catchpoint enables monitoring from different regions are that you can make country-specific queries and know in which country a site might be blocked or is slower, which is very important if the website needs to be available worldwide.

I also appreciate that reporting is a very important and good feature, along with the dashboards.

Catchpoint has had a positive impact on my company because we have a good overview of the worldwide availability of our sites, at least in the countries where we need to make them available.

I can specifically tell you that we were able to meet the internal KPIs we set, since with Catchpoint we were able to confirm that the KPIs had been met.

I don't think of anything that could improve Catchpoint at the moment.

Perhaps I would like to see better integration with other tools.

I have been using Catchpoint for eight years.

In my experience, Catchpoint is stable.

I rate the scalability of Catchpoint as good.

How I find the customer support of Catchpoint depends on who I have as an account manager at the time, but overall it is quite good.

I did use another solution before Catchpoint, which was Neustar.

I switched because Catchpoint has better capabilities.

My experience with pricing, setup effort, and licensing with Catchpoint is that it is not the cheapest product.

I consider the investment to be justified for large companies; definitely so for large companies. For small and medium-sized businesses I see a big problem, as large companies can handle it while small and medium ones, I do not think so.

Before deciding on Catchpoint, I evaluated a few other solutions, though I do not remember exactly which.

My advice for others considering using Catchpoint is to evaluate the costs carefully and evaluate the integration capabilities carefully. I would rate this review an 8.

Public Cloud

Our DevOps and our development team used Catchpoint exclusively for synthetic testing of API and URL endpoints. Our DevOps team is like a composite team for the solution users. Their job was to operate the tool and build the test, and they were the primary folks using it daily. 

The developers used Catchpoint for pre-production testing to ensure that the tests ran and gave them the needed data. They made improvements to the systems that were being monitored. We had around 100 users on the whole platform. The third group was my team, the platform owners. We were in there running daily reports. 

When we started, it was pretty light because we were trying to evolve our thinking, and then it grew. The contract was renegotiated when I was leaving, and we were increasing the test count even higher than we had, indicating a higher level of interest in what we could get out of it. 

Catchpoint is a natively built cloud. There are also ways to deploy an agent internally for tests that sit behind firewalls and internal systems, but the platform is definitely SaaS.

Integration is essential. We can tell what's going on in our infrastructure and all the other events in our environments simultaneously. Our hand-built, in-house integration solution had a lot of overhead. at the same time, Catchpoint was essentially ready out of the box. We only need to configure a connector. That was a huge win. 

Also, our outside-in tests from our previous provider would trigger an alert. Someone would look at that test failure and say, "Well, the site's up. What's wrong here?" We couldn't eliminate ourselves as the culprit. We couldn't tell if it was being routed through an entirely different AS across the internet because someone between us and the test site has a provider issue.

Catchpoint helped us establish that something is in a provider network, so we could tell our customers to check their internet provider because the traffic is not getting to us. You need to be gentle when you tell them that, but the fact that we could do it was crucial.

Catchpoint's UI is well designed, which was a major selling point for us. It's easy to get the visibility you want. The essential piece for us was the external integration with other tools. We needed to get alerts and test result data into other systems we utilized to roll up that information about how our enterprise was working. 

Lastly, we appreciate the visibility Catchpoint gives us into the provider networks we were traversing when our test ran from an endpoint in a data center to our internal applications.

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. 

I no longer Catchpoint, but I used it for approximately a year and a half.

Catchpoint is incredibly reliable. I rate the stability 10 out of 10.  

SaaS products are built for scalability, so you never see the infrastructure behind them. The only limitation on scalability is the on-prem element, but honestly, you could CI/CD pipeline that and remove the scalability question there. 

We never got around to it when I was there, but it's all on the customer to do that. If you're looking at it from the perspective of the core product, it's entirely scalable. I would rate Catchpoint 10 out of 10 for scalability.

I love Catchpoint support. I'd rate them 10 out of 10. They're incredibly easy to work with, and you don't need to go through layers of bureaucracy to get to people who can answer your questions. I'm connected to their CEO on LinkedIn, and I communicate with him occasionally to let him know how things are going. We never had a problem getting the answers we needed, including post-sales.

Before Catchpoint, we had a custom-scripted integration solution. We switched because it was cheaper, integration was more straightforward, and the UI was better. We were trying to create a UX that hadn't existed before because we understood the need to evolve. We felt we could lower the cost, and Catchpoint would allow us to see into provider networks. 

Ironically, we ended up disabling a lot of that functionality because it became too expensive. Ultimately, we only selected basic tests to stay under our budget. But in the beginning, it was a reason we switched.

It wasn't the only reason, but we had a significant visibility issue with China. We didn't have good node coverage in China with our previous provider. The third reason relates to integration. We needed to seamlessly put products together and have them tell our end-to-end story.

One of our goals was to transition away from managing by exception to actually utilizing the tool. That's why UI became so important. It was the first time we could get teams to use it proactively. It wasn't just, "Oh, there's an alert. Let me go into the console. Okay, yeah. I know what that is. Let's go fix it."

I rate Catchpoint a solid eight out of 10 for ease of deployment. We migrated somewhere around 2,000 tests in less than a month. While it took us a few weeks, we migrated a ton of stuff in that 30 days.

I don't know if it is standard per se, but we had a project manager assigned to our migration. You tell them the tool you're moving from. We didn't pay any extra for this other than what was already in the contract. 

We told them, "Here are the types of tests we have, and this is what we need them to be." We provided them with technical guidance for questions about the tests because some things don't convert directly. 

There were times when they would reach out to us and say, "Okay. What about this group of tests? What were you trying to do here?" They helped us a lot with the conversion. We had to do very little in-house.

Abandoning the old solution involved switching tools and transitioning from our custom integration. I look at that holistically. Without either one of those being optimized, there would be problems.

We could deploy a test around 25 to 30 percent faster with Catchpoint than we could before them. Their test-writing language for complex cases needed work, but it was still better than we had. I can't even put a number on the ability to detect whether we were looking at a provider issue or our problem. We couldn't automate it. :

We could eventually triage and troubleshoot it, but we couldn't see it in real-time. That was a considerable return on investment. The ability to definitively tell a customer that the issue is on their end is invaluable because it helps us talk them down off a cliff. The capacity to identify those issues regionally, nationally, and globally was an unbelievable return on our investment.

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.

If I decide to add performance checking and all those time metrics I just mentioned, that might be 1.5. It'll slap on an extra 0.5 because you're pulling back more data and taxing their systems further. You can add screenshots. What did it see at this point? What they call snippets in some tools. That typically adds another point or more in some cases because that is very intensive. 

Using google.com as an example, if I have the test login for me, that's a step in the test. It also gets a point value because each action can have all the same data recorded. A multi-step or transaction-based test could cost you seven or eight points every time it runs. You buy an allotment of points up front. And as you consume those points, your balance goes down until you run out.

You buy an allotment of points for a year on a contract with the expectation that you have planned your tests and what you expect to do with them. They will give you a rounded estimate, and you negotiate the price of your contract based on the points you buy. They are tiered, so you will get better deals as you put more testing into the system. Smaller contracts tend to be more expensive per point than larger contracts where you get volume discounts.

The price is reasonable, but we didn't save as much as we'd hoped. When we pitted them against Dynatrace, our Dynatrace sales guy was ready to negotiate. It's like buying a used car. We didn't save a ton, but we felt like the feature set we got kind of made up for that.  

Value-wise, ThousandEyes would've saved us almost 40 percent, but there were a couple of hangups with that product that my leadership was unwilling to overlook. I thought they were minor, especially considering we're always trying to save money. However, the leadership of the DevOps team decided it wasn't worth saving that much money."

Ironically, ThousandEyes is now priced higher than Catchpoint. They have tried to regain our business, but now they're more expensive. There's an ebb and flow. If they're trying to get new business, they will probably treat you better than they do if you're an ongoing customer.

I give Catchpoint three out of five for affordability because they're transparent, there's no haggling, and they're willing to undercut anybody else in the industry. I don't think there's anything special about their pricing model. I don't believe that they're particularly insanely fair. It's more of a you-get-what-you-pay-for type thing.

It's not easy to figure out the point scale, but there are built-in tools to quickly simulate a test and determine what it will cost. I think they are highly transparent. I don't remember there being a single hidden fee. There is a cost if you attempt on-prem testing, but no mysteries there. 

Catchpoint is one of several that can perform this same function. I generally consider the raw capabilities of all these tools to be somewhat commodified at this point. They're relatively mature, and I don't see much difference. 

You have an endpoint somewhere and configure a test. It runs from the endpoint and tells you if your stuff is available. That's generally what these tools do. Most importantly, we don't need people sitting in front of this tool all the time. They don't have to sit there and watch it.

We evaluated other options like ThousandEyes, and our existing product was Dynatrace, which was rebranded as Gomez. There was one more. We took the three and did a bake-off. 

I give Catchpoint eight out of 10. It's excellent software, but when I start thinking of quality software, it's not the first thing that comes to mind. Depending on your cost model, I would've recommended ThousandEyes before they increased their prices. I don't think it's overwhelmingly good, but it's a solid eight.

My advice to Catchpoint users is to know your tests. You will struggle when they're trying to estimate your point usage. Ultimately, we had to disable several features because we had poorly calculated that. Plan for increased adoption because you can buy more points ad hoc, but they're not as cheap as buying them up front. At the same time, don't overbuy because anything unused is wasted.

Public Cloud

Other

We're using Catchpoint for monitoring activities. From a user perspective, we're using the tool to monitor online shopping customers and support global customers. Suppose customers face issues when purchasing, we get alerts from Catchpoint. Wherever there are red alerts, there are issues in specific markets, so these are the notifications we receive in Catchpoint. Through the tool, we can further drill down to see the flows we need to validate, and we can also see the input parameters the customers are using. We can also use Catchpoint to get test data in real time and validate those quickly.

There are scatter plots in the tool where there are frequent drops or frequent notifications for specific markets, so we can just go over the scatter plots, see the time duration where we can identify, for particular markets, that the drops are consistent, and that would mean there aren't critical issues going on, so based on that information, we can take the actions we need.

The best feature in Catchpoint is the alert or the notification my company gets frequently, in particular, every five minutes. It's the notification you get whenever a respective market has an issue. There's also a dashboard in Catchpoint that shows the markets you support, so all the markets will be highlighted graphically in the dashboard whenever there's downtime that could affect you. If there's no issue for a specific market, it will be in green, so in this way, anybody would be able to understand which market has issues and which market has no issues through Catchpoint.

The tool is very useful for monitoring activities.

A room for improvement in Catchpoint is that it lacks an automated page updating feature. My company receives all the alerts and notifications it needs, but the page doesn't update automatically. You need to manually refresh the page, so every five minutes you need to refresh it to see the most updated information. If there's an automated page refresh feature, that would help my company. It's a feature that Grafana has. The page auto-refreshes in Grafana, so you don't have to manually refresh the page. If that feature is implemented in Catchpoint, it'll be useful for the users.

Another area for improvement in the tool is you have to do a manual task, for example, when you have a notification for a market, you get a zip code that the user could have entered, but if the zip code is incorrect, you have to manually go into Catchpoint and update that parameter, so that manual step is another area in the tool that needs improvement.

I've been using Catchpoint for around one year or so.

Catchpoint is a stable solution.

Catchpoint is a scalable solution.

If we have any issues with Catchpoint, we have a separate team we directly communicate with, and they are very quick with their response.

The initial setup for Catchpoint isn't complex. It's straightforward. The deployment was handled by a separate team, so I'm unsure of how long the process took.

I don't have any idea on the pricing information for Catchpoint.

I'm using the latest version of Catchpoint.

At the moment, twelve people from the production support team use Catchpoint within the company.

My company plans to continue using the tool, and there's no plan to change it to a different tool.

My advice to others who want to start using Catchpoint is that it's more useful for eCommerce businesses, and if you want to use it, it's a very, very helpful tool because it captures data from end-to-end. It will entirely capture online shopping processes, so it's a very useful tool.

My rating for Catchpoint is eight out of ten.

I'm a user of Catchpoint.

Currently, our organization is adopting Asawari principles. We are using Catchpoint as a marketing tool. 

We create automation scripts for our applications. Those scripts are running in Catchpoint, enabling us to hit different geolocations, ensuring that prospective customers are reliable when they come to our sites.

Catchpoint provides the data for our internal dashboard which shows us the reliability of the customer.

Catchpoint's customer service and support are valuable. They are available and able to help us whenever we need extra features. They are clear with respect to what they can or cannot do.

I like that you can record the sessions, and you are able to test the transaction type, web-based and API based. They provide the raw APIs to pull the data. 

Catchpoint's new user interface has a lot of new features enabled and many more functionalities than previous versions.

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. 

I have been using Catchpoint for the past three years.

This solution is stable, particularly this past year. We run different kinds of tests, transactions and API where we felt some difficulties, but they have a different patch of releases that are addressing each concern one by one. 

Catchpoint is scalable. They have acquired a lot of data centers across the United States. We have over 300 daily users of the solution in our organization. The majority of the users are quality analysts and developers.

When we started using Catchpoint there were not many features and low functionality from our project perspective. We continuously work with customer service and support, and they help us whenever we need any extra features. 

Catchpoint has a very professional service team. They can help you with the scripting and other functionalities. They have a dedicated network team, so if you face any issues with the geolocations on the nodes or anything related to the network, there is dedicated support available 24 hours a day, seven days a week. 

When considering the technical scripting perspective, I would rate their customer service and support a five out of five. If we are talking about the network side, I would rate them a four out of five. On the network side, they will analyze your ticket. The analysis requires them to take more time, delaying the resolution of your concern.

Positive

The initial setup of Catchpoint is easy. They have all the manuals in the subscription page. By going through the documentation, it is very easy to set up. 

When doing the scripting part, you have all the main functionalities that can be used in Catchpoint. The script development is already there for you to go through and utilize.

Overall, I would rate the initial setup of Catchpoint a five out of five.

The license agreement our company purchased came with a certain process requiring you to go through their site and register with your corporate email ID. Once you register, an email is auto-generated that includes the procedure needed to follow for set up.

Technically speaking, we are seeing improvements.

Overall, I would rate Catchpoint an eight out of 10.

Our company tests versions of international websites for our clients and we use the solution's simple node backbone to track website response metrics and waterfalls. 

Our use case is unique because most companies conduct constant, proactive monitoring but we are responsive and only monitor when we experience issues.

The solution offers three different ways of slicing data to look for abnormalities. For example, you can slice data in a graph to include X and Y metrics but also time and city metrics. 

The solution allows the creation of response headers whose values can be captured with regex and compared to logs. We send different proxy performance metrics through different header values and it is important to have that information tied to our data so we can pull it by test and look at response times. 

A large selection of nodes are available but it is challenging to test reliably in China and the Middle East. This might be a stability issue based on ISPs in different locations. 

Documentation and online indexing are awful but have been improved recently.

I would like a reference document that includes ratings of different ISPs. I always test locations and weed out bad internet providers but it would be nice to have experts providing this feedback. 

The online recorder add-on to Chrome that records transaction tests could be improved. If you do not write tests every day it is easy to forget steps, so the tool is useful but has some bugs. 

I provide clients with links to waterfalls but they are not as detailed as what I see in the app. I join metrics and include response bars in one table but that robust detail cannot be viewed via client links. 

The solution is stable. 

The solution is easy to scale. 

The solution offers an integrated help desk chat that responds quickly but is not staffed with experts. Fast escalations are provided to engineers if needed. Constant feedback is received and issues are resolved on-the-spot or within days. 

I rate support an eight out of ten. 

Positive

The setup was very straightforward but we were not installing the complete, integrated solution. 

We purchased a contract that includes way too many points for the type of monitoring we do. 

The solution's pricing is comparable to the last tool we were using. 

A client uses New Relic because the UI is straightforward for business users but I prefer the way I can slice data in Catchpoint. 

It is difficult for any one solution to provide consistent metrics because websites are built differently. We use basic response metrics that can identify issues such as the CDN breaking on compression. 

There is a bit of a learning curve with the solution. Someone on the business side of things may prefer a solution that lays things out from a UI perspective. 

The solution offers a lot of variability in the ways you can look at and graph data. 

I rate the solution an eight out of ten. 

Catchpoint is used for synthetic monitoring. For example, if you have a URL, you may want to ensure that your customer's journey is monitored from a user-experience standpoint. 

In Catchpoint, you can enter the user action, and that user action can then be configured as a script. Catchpoint will then continue to emulate that user's steps every 5 minutes or 10 minutes, as it is defined by you.

If you have a service product and have just exposed the API in your data. In those cases, you can perform API monitoring by passing sample data contracts and validating whether your API is responding to the query or not. It can also tell you what the time is, what the response score is, and so on.

That is the function of features. The most valuable features of Catchpoint are basically the transaction monitors on the API and UI.

Because these transaction monitors also monitor your product's entry-point URLs, there are numerous things it can do to improve. Assume you have a SaaS for a company, and they want to add a status page as a feature. When a company decides to set up monitors for their entry-point URLs, that status page can be exposed to customers as well.

Catchpoint can display downtime as the status whenever it detects it. And can be used by the company to demonstrate to their customers that there is a downtime occurring and that we are working on it, from the standpoint of customer communication.

That is the other issue, in that their API is extensive but also a lot. There are essentially a lot of quotas. Nobody wants to sit and manually create monitors for someone who uses synthetic monitoring.

With the direction of the industry, many people want to work in automation. Creating monitors as automation is an important aspect of their growth, which I did not see when I used it because they did not have an API for which you could actually create monitors.

I have been working with Catchpoint for approximately five or six years.

As Catchpoint is a SaaS provider, we would be working with the latest version.

Catchpoint is a SaaS product that serves as a central monitoring tool. Catchpoint provides virtual agents, but you can also have your own nodes in your environment. 

In my experience, we have used a combination of the two. The nodes were set up on AWS in the cloud to monitor the health of internal URLs. Then, for the public, for example, for region-specific monitoring, we wanted to use a German monitor. Then, using Catchpoint, publish your virtual monitors and agents.

Catchpoint is a very stable solution.

Scalability, I believe, is a perspective. From a scalability standpoint, it is good at times and bad at others, in my opinion. Assuming I have a single node, I'll show an example of Catchpoint hosted in my own environment.

If I host a Catchpoint node on my own and that node fails for whatever reason, there is no way for me to create nodes in a cluster so that if one node fails, the monitor picks up the other node and so on. On the UI, that is a manual configuration. I need to make a node group or something similar by grouping three nodes together.

If the load on a single node is high, Catchpoint does not distribute the load across the node group that was created. If they can handle it, it will be very, very good for scalability. Otherwise, their public nodes, such as the virtual agents that they provide, are sufficiently scalable. They can handle them on their own. The only issue with scalability arises when you deploy your own node in your environment.

It's our team, the observability team, which consists of about 5 to 10 people. We are in charge of setting up the transaction monitors.

Everyone who owns the product. They are used by product teams. Overall, in the company, there are approximately 5,000 users.

Technical support is good.  They also provide professional services, which are good.

It is fairly easy to set up.

We had it up and running in a day.

In terms of licensing fees, I believe they were slightly higher. I believe their primary market is large enterprises, but from a licensing cost standpoint, I believe there are other tools available that provide the same functionality at a lower cost, such as Pingdom and others.

There are numerous sites available 24 hours a day, seven days a week. There are numerous other synthetic monitoring tools that compete with Catchpoint. However, I believe Catchpoint positions itself as a tool for large enterprises with money to spend, which is why they are expensive.

I would advise them to use this product if they can afford it.

I would rate Catchpoint an eight out of ten.

They only lose two points for the cost; otherwise, the insights they provide are really good. There are not many competitive tools that don't provide them.

Public Cloud

Amazon Web Services (AWS)

Our primary use case for the solution is for end vision monitoring with an endpoint solution. We also use them to create network status while focusing on the synthetic solution because of digital monitoring. Catchpoint provides a great amount of information, and customers want budgets, so they spend less on cheaper products. Catchpoint has a better chance to increase its market, but they have been focusing on the synthetic force because there is a clear advantage and digital monitoring. We deploy the solution on-premises.

Catchpoint tries to cover the full stack of other computers. However, it is not a good idea because many computers can check the complete spec monitoring, like Datadog, New Relic and Dynatrace. Hence, Catchpoint can be improved by focusing solely on network monitoring.

Additionally, for the old process, we provided a base point that is not cheap compared to a more affordable version like pin down. So further improvements can be made by assessing their strategy and improving brand marketing for the latest version of Catchpoint because many customers are unaware of it.

We have been using Catchpoint for over four years.

I rate the stability a nine out of ten.

I rate the scalability an eight out of ten.

We get customer service and support from our vendors.

We implement it with a vendor team.

I rate the price a two out of ten, where one is a high price and ten is a low price.

I rate the solution a six out of ten. The solution is good but can be improved by focusing solely on network monitoring and improving its marketing strategy to strengthen consumer awareness of the solution.

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 Catchpoint could incorporate its alerting system instead of relying on separate tools like ServiceNow.

I have been using the product for a year. 

I haven't encountered any issues with the product. 

My company has 50 users. 

I haven't contacted the tool's support team yet. 

The solution is worth its money. 

The product is flexible and good. We receive alerts through various channels like CRM, and directly from Catchpoint and Sumo Logic. These alerts prompt us to investigate and troubleshoot issues in real-time on our production servers. I rate it an eight out of ten for its flexibility. 

On-premises

We were using this solution to monitor the shopping element of our partner sites.

The drill-down feature of this product was very good. It allowed us to identify the exact page or area of the site that was causing our customers an issue.

We would like the script creation feature of this solution to be improved, as it currently requires a complicated manual process to update the scripts.

We worked with this solution for around two years.

We found this to be a stable solution.

We chose this solution because it made it easy to track multiple nodes of traffic from multiple locations.

I would recommend that new users spend time familiarizing themselves with the UI of this product, before they begin using it more fully.

I would rate this solution a nine out of ten.

On-premises

We are using this to monitor our applications, our global applications, like the Autodesk Store, Autodesk.com application websites, Autodesk subscription portal, Autodesk account management. So all those global websites that our customers access are monitored through Catchpoint. It's used as a global synthetic monitoring solution.

Catchpoint is actually catching issues before customers see them, since it's checking the sites every five minutes or even every minute, via the APIs. So, it's catching issues alerting the team proactively that there is an issue.

We really need the API monitoring, as well as client side session monitoring, the global synthetic monitoring, to track the availability of the systems from the customer side. So, it's mainly used to measure the availability and to check whether the sites are available from the customer's perspective. It's used to test it from the end-user perspective.

There are lots of areas. One is, if we need to do performance analysis, we have to click too many times. For example, if there is an issue that is caught by Catchpoint, we need to understand what the error is and at which step it failed, or which transaction that is impacted. To drill down, we have to click too many things to get the answer.

One to three years.

So far we have not had any issues with stability.

Scalability, since it's a specific appliance that we purchase and we consume, there is no way to scale, but it's easy to scale if we have to buy additional licenses. But it's a long process.

The thing I like most is the tech support in this company, because they have 24/7 chat support. We can chat immediately and ask them about an issue and they keep responding. They create tickets on our behalf and respond. That's the best part of Catchpoint compared to all other products. This is not a feature that is available with all of our companies. We can go to support and there is always a person sitting there and answering our questions.

We previously used Sitescope. It is a high-speed product but it was not evolving to match the technology changes that were happening in the industry, like syndicated applications, APIs, and different encryptions. It was not handling or supporting those types of things. Whereas Catchpoint supports all these things: single-page application, AJAX, different types of authentications. We wanted to move to that.

The setup was straightforward.

We worked with the support team. At that time they did not have a dedicated training portal. Now, they have come up with a dedicated training portal where we can do training. It's available for all customers and you then get certification. So they have made it easy.

The price and licensing are very, very high. They have to come down on the pricing to match with the industry standard. I don't think they will be able to get customers.

During that time we evaluated New Relic. New Relic did not have an on-prem node. We had some internal applications, so we needed both internal and external application monitoring. The internal application monitoring was not supported, only the external application was supported by New Relic. Whereas, at that time, Catchpoint supported both, so that's one reason.

The other reason was that Catchpoint uses a scripting language called Selenium, which is very similar to our testing framework, so it was really easy. The Selenium test scripting framework was the main reason we picked it because our team, our company, is familiar with this language, the scripting language they use for all the monitoring scripts.

We also evaluated Dynatrace. Dynatrace was closer, but at that time they didn't have the same kind of on-prem node.

I have noticed they are coming up with APIs to get metrics and then prepare dashboards. Also, they are enhancing their reports on transaction monitoring and they're coming up with solution enhancements every quarter. I really like that.

In terms of advice, it can differ from company to company. For example, if you're looking for solutions like just web page monitoring or the API, I would say Catchpoint is the best one. But if requirements involve database queries, SNMP monitoring, etc., they don't have it. They're working on fixing that, I think. 

But web page monitoring, when it comes to global synthetic monitoring, I recommend them for just web pages.

I would rate Catchpoint at seven out of 10 overall. There are a few enhancements that we have requested, as I mentioned, such as better drill-down to get failure details. That's one of the major things. And then there is trending. Currently, out-of-the-box, they provide only seven days availability. So, we have to do queries and we have to go into a separate analysis module, we have to run lot of queries to long-term trends. Long-term trends are something that management is always keen about. Those are the areas that, if they improve, I would rate them a 10.