Internet Weather (Limited Preview)
The digital systems used by your customers and workforce are constantly evolving and growing in complexity. A given system may involve hundreds of interconnected services or components, including networks, DNS, CDNs, hosts, APIs, security, and many others. Understanding the impact each of these third-party services has on user experience is challenging, and it isn’t feasible to monitor all of them yourself when your main responsibility is to make sure your own systems are running smoothly.
Catchpoint’s Internet Weather service helps solve this problem by taking on the task of monitoring all the services in the internet stack for you. Now, instead of creating active and passive monitors for every third-party service your systems depend on, Internet Weather provides simple analytics and notifications informing you when any of these services have outages in a region your customers and/or workforce operate in. Our outage-detection algorithm uses data from millions of daily test runs on the largest node network in the world, ensuring outages are detected quickly from as many locations as possible.
To sign up for the Internet Weather preview, please complete this form.
Playwright Test (Limited Preview)
We are introducing a new Transaction test type that enables you to run multi-step web tests using Playwright scripts. The initial version of this test type supports the Microsoft Edge monitor.
This change is dependent on the latest version of the Catchpoint Agent, which will be rolled out in stages following the release.
In this release, we are supporting Playwright transactions in Instant Tests, as well as scheduled tests run on Enterprise nodes. If you are an enterprise customer and would like to be part of the preview, please complete this form.
Records Compare
With the new Records Compare feature, you can select up to four test runs or transaction steps for Web, HTML code, API and Transaction tests and compare their performance side by side.
Dynamic Location-Based Node Targeting
Catchpoint is constantly expanding our node footprint to reach more geographical locations and ISPs, and customers may also add their own Enterprise nodes in new offices, retail locations, factories, datacenters, etc. It can be difficult to keep up with these changes when managing node targeting in your tests, as this requires continuous maintenance of test and node group settings.
To address this, we now support dynamic node groups based on geographical locations, which automatically include all active nodes within the selected location. For example, you may wish to always target every node in New York. By adding a node group with New York selected under “Node Locations”, your node group will always be updated to target all available active nodes in New York, without any manual maintenance of the node group.
New Traceroute Monitor - InSession
When performing a conventional traceroute, if a device along the network path drops packets, this results in an incomplete trace and may hamper your ability to troubleshoot an issue. To overcome this problem, we have added the InSession monitor to traceroute. InSession uses the TCP protocol, but it begins by establishing a TCP connection to the destination before sending probes, ensuring a complete, traceable path.
Traceroute InSession monitor can be set as a stand-alone test, used with the Node-to-Node test, or enabled as an Additional Monitor with other test types. In scenarios where Traceroute InSession fails, for example if it was not able to establish a TCP connection, then it will fall back to regular TCP traceroute and fallback warning message will be displayed on the Records page for that test run.
This change is dependent on the latest version of the Catchpoint Agent, which will be rolled out in stages following the release.
Help Menu Updates
We have consolidated our help menu and resource guide to provide easier access to items such as our documentation portal, API swagger pages, and get started guides. You can find all help resources under the question mark icon in the charm bar.
Custom Dashboard Enhancements
This release includes several enhancements to custom dashboards:
Dashboard Tabs
We recently improved the usability of the Overview Dashboard by displaying each overview as a tab at the top of the screen. We are now applying the same improvement to your Custom Dashboards. Now, when you click on a folder, all Dashboards contained in that folder will be displayed as tabs. This will make it easier to navigate to the desired dashboard in just one click.
Default Dashboard
Users can now easily select a default dashboard by making a selection in the desired dashboard’s three-dot menu, rather than having to make a modification in the Contacts page.
Changelog
The new Custom Dashboard changelog allows you to see when each change was made, what the change was, and who made it. This applies to the dashboard overall, not to the individual widgets within a dashboard. We plan to release a per-widget changelog soon!
SLO Enhancements (Limited Preview)
Customers previewing our SLO monitoring feature can now specify a start time and end time for SLO data collection. This will allow you to align your SLOs with the SLAs you are monitoring to ensure that you are collecting all the data you need for your SLA contract periods, as well as ensuring that you do not collect any unwanted data.
Control Center Enhancements
When creating or editing folders for your tests in Control Center, you can now have multiple folders with the same name, so long as they are not located in the same parent folder/product.
Credentials Library Enhancements
- You can now add contact groups to the access list for tokens/passwords/certificates when creating or editing credentials in the library, making credential security management more efficient.
- "Save to Library" will now be selected by default when you create a new token, password, or certificate from the Instant Test page or Tests section in Control Center.
- When viewing a credential in the Library, you will see links to the products, folders, and tests using the credential. This can be found in the “Items using this credential” section in the credential properties blade.
Explorer Enhancements
Based on customer feedback, we have implemented two features from the legacy platform in Symphony: the trendline, and a raw data download option. Now, when viewing a line graph in Explorer, you can enable a trendline which shows the overall tendency of the charted data, and you will be able to download the raw data for analysis with other tools.
BGP - Routing Information Service (RIS) Live Data
Border Gateway Protocol (BGP) is the routing protocol for the Internet. Its main role is to exchange reachability information among BGP systems in order to efficiently direct traffic. Catchpoint collects BGP data from three different sources: Routing Information Service (RIS), University of Oregon Route Views project, and Catchpoint-owned data sources. Prior to this release, the RIS data was collected at five-minute intervals, but going forward we will be getting live data from RIS, helping to ensure your BGP monitors are using the most current routing data possible.
Custom Dashboard - Call Quality
Many remote workforces rely heavily on MS Teams audio and video calls for collaboration, so it is important to understand how network throughput impacts call quality for each of your employees. Endpoints running the latest version of the Catchpoint User Experience app with packet capture enabled will now capture call-quality metrics for all MS Teams calls. Call quality is measured by analysing network flows at one-minute intervals.
You can now create widgets in Custom Dashboard using the Call Quality metric to build dedicated dashboards aimed at understanding MS Teams performance and user experience.
API v2
We have been adding endpoints to our REST API v2. The new capabilities that we have added this release are:
Credentials Library Management
Add, update or delete credentials library items.
Changelog
Retrieve changelog for division, product, folder, test, nodes, instances, contacts and more.