Catchpoint Review & Alternatives

User experience is a critical part of today's digital world and an important metric to stay ahead of the competition. 

Let's look at some statistics to understand its importance.

• 32% of customers leave a loved brand after just one bad experience.
• 88% of users don't return to a website after a bad user experience.
• Every $1 invested in UX results in a return of $100.

The statistics can go on, but the user experience can be a gamechanger for an online business.

While it may seem overwhelming to measure user experience, the good news is there are many tools available for handling this metric for you, and Catchpoint is one of them.

What is Catchpoint?

Catchpoint is an advanced tool that gives instant insights into the user experience. Specifically, it checks hundreds of nodes and proactively monitors and analyzes the performance of your digital services across these nodes. As a business, such detailed monitoring highlights issues and their root causes so that you can troubleshoot them accordingly.

Features of Catchpoint

Here is a detailed look at the features of Catchpoint and how it can benefit your organization.

Extensive Monitoring

A salient feature of Catchpoint is its monitoring capabilities. It is designed to monitor more than 800 backbone, cloud, last mile, and wireless network points spanning across many geographies. As a result, it detects suboptimal experiences as they occur and sends a report to the concerned people/team within your organization.

This extensive monitoring capability of Catchpoint ensures the high performance and availability of your digital services.

Stateless Architecture

Catchpoint has stateless nodes that can send strong signals, making this a highly reliable platform.

This architecture also reduces false positives as the test won't run when there are issues in the testing environment.

Dynamic Thresholds

This platform enables you to set dynamic thresholds based on the circumstances and requirements. Such flexibility will allow you to identify shifts in trends and any deviations in the baseline.

Along with each alert, you get extended debugging information to understand and troubleshoot better.

Comprehensive Across Platforms

Catchpoint is a comprehensive digital platform that goes beyond just cloud monitoring. It can monitor all cloud, on-prem, hybrid, wireless, broadband, last mile, and more.

This platform monitors 855 nodes spread across 86 countries, 248 cities, and 298 providers. As a result, you have a comprehensive understanding of your entire applications' performance and not just your cloud-based services.

Different Types of Monitoring

Catchpoint offers five different types of monitoring so that you can choose the best fit for your needs.

These five monitoring types are:

• Synthetic Monitoring – In this type, a script is used to create a specific activity, and this activity is monitored to understand the performance of your applications.
• Real-user Monitoring – This type monitors real users as they interact with your websites in real-time.
• Network Insights – Provides insights about the underlying network, such as broadband and wireless, so you can make the necessary changes to improve your applications' performance and availability.
• Endpoint Monitoring – It monitors the performance of nodes and endpoints. This way, you know what your users experience precisely, and this, in turn, can isolate the cause of delays. The same can be used to identify and fix issues that impact users.
• Managed Monitoring – In this form of monitoring, Catchpoint's experts monitor your assets 24X7 so that you can be assured of improved performance and reduced downtime.

These different monitoring types give a lot of flexibility for businesses, as they can choose just what they want. You can also choose to combine more than one monitoring type.

Dashboards and Reports

Catchpoint's dashboards are well-designed to give a snapshot of the information that matters to you. At any time, you can know the performance of your websites and applications, and you can compare it with historical performance to understand the trends. Accordingly, you can correlate them with the impact of any changes implemented within your organization.

Catchpoint also generates extensive reports that can be used for historical comparisons and analysis and auditing purposes. In particular, it can come in handy for measuring the SLAs of your service providers.

Thus, these are some of the salient features of this tool. Now, let's move on to a critical review, so you can determine if this is the right tool for your business.

A Critical Review of Catchpoint

Catchpoint is undoubtedly a popular platform for measuring user experience, thanks to its simplicity, reliability, and speed. In addition, it can provide extensive metrics that can be used to improve the overall performance and availability of your applications.

Its screen capture feature, in particular, can help you to better gauge the end-user experience.

Further, its dashboards and graphical views visually represent your applications' performance, while the reports can be used for decision-making and auditing. The customer support team is also responsive and can help with any issues.

Its many monitoring types provide a ton of flexibility to organizations as they can choose the proper monitoring type needed depending on geographical spread, nature of applications, and more.

Overall, it is a highly dependable tool that can improve the performance of your application by measuring end-user experience.

However, as with any tool, it also comes with many shortcomings.

A prominent drawback is its low list of integrations. Catchpoint doesn't integrate seamlessly with popular applications, and this requires organizations to make changes to their existing infrastructure to accommodate this tool. Depending on how an organization's setup is structured, this could entail additional effort and resources.

Also, it can help to have more training material and resources, so users don't have to rely extensively on the support team for simple changes and queries. The UI can be improved as well.

Finally, the reporting does not allow a lot of customizations, and this acts as a constraint for some users who want to create reports geared to meet specific standards or formats.

Thus, these are the pros and cons of Catchpoint.

Pros & Cons

Catchpoint's Alternatives

While many platforms measure end-user experience, below are some of the top alternatives to Catchpoint.

• Pingdom End User Experience Monitoring – This popular tool from SolarWinds makes it easy to benchmark your performance metrics and compare the actual performance against these thresholds to understand where your application stands and what areas have to be improved. It can come in handy to check the impact of policy and application-level changes. Click here for a fully functional 30-day free trial.
• Site24X7 – An all-in-one monitoring platform that is well-suited for ensuring the uptime and availability of your web applications. Its globally distributed infrastructure makes it easy to monitor end-user experience from any part of the world. Start a 30-day free trial.
• Datadog – This comprehensive monitoring and security platform can look for problems inside any stack and app and at any scale, which means you're likely to get in-depth insights and information about the performance of your applications. You can make appropriate changes to boost its usability, reliability, and availability based on this information.
• Dynatrace – Specializes in gathering information about your end-users so that you can provide them with a personalized experience. Its many metrics help marketers, and business executives understand users’ pulse; however, some and the overall market so that the application can leverage them.
• ThousandEyes – Provides a comprehensive understanding of the end-user experience and their associated metrics in real-time. You can make the appropriate changes to attract more people to your application. Further, it provides insights into issues for quick troubleshooting and improvements.

Conclusion

To conclude, Catchpoint is a good choice for businesses looking to measure the all-important end-user experience and improve their applications on this front as this is likely to bring more users to interact with the application.

The many types of monitoring offered and its extensive infrastructure are the highlights of this tool. Some areas can be better, such as customization in reports, a better UI, and more integrations.

If these aspects are essential, you can also look at other alternatives.