This release is named after the white-throated needletail, a fast bird reputed to reach speeds of up to 170 km/h (105 mph). White-throated needletails breed in Central Asia and Southern Siberia, migrating south for the winter. They get their name from the spined end of their tail and white patch on their throat.
Internet Sonar GA
In a previous release, we announced a limited preview of Internet Weather, which is now renamed Internet Sonar. This new product helps detect outages occurring in 3rd party services you rely on. With Internet Sonar, you can benefit from the expertise of the Catchpoint team to identify outages for key services including DNS, CDNs, hosting and cloud providers, APIs, security, and many others. This helps reduce complexity in your monitoring strategy, leading to greater visibility and the ability to get to the root cause of an issue faster.
We’re happy to announce that after collecting valuable feedback during the preview, Internet Sonar is now GA (Generally Available). Improvements made in this release include:
- Addition of more services and identification of cloud region and subservice outages
- Faster and more reliable outage detection
- Various usability improvements and defect fixes
SLO GA
After an extensive period of development, testing, and refining, we are pleased to announce that our SLO monitoring feature is now officially GA to all our valued customers!
SLO Monitoring enables you to define performance objectives and apply them to your tests so that you can easily track whether your services are meeting the objectives defined in your SLA.
SLOs are calculated by taking the minutes that a test was in violation of a performance threshold as a percentage of the entire time period being evaluated. Key capabilities of SLO Monitoring include:
- Monitor test performance against SLOs in terms of Availability or Test Time
- Precisely define violation conditions
- View up to three different timeframes in one view
We appreciate all the valuable feedback and insights that were provided during our preview and beta phases. This input was instrumental in refining SLO Monitoring to its current state, and we're confident that you will love using it in your daily monitoring activities.
To get started with SLO monitoring, simply view our SLO Documentation. For any assistance or questions, please reach out to support@catchpoint.com.
Tracing (Limited Preview)
We are excited to announce a limited preview of Tracing which provides end-to-end monitoring of distributed applications across serverless architectures, containers, and virtual machines. Tracing allows you understand application behavior by providing granular information on all the interactions between services and associated resources, such as databases, caches, queues, streams etc., which helps you to analyze the resource usage, rapidly troubleshoot and debug applications.
To sign up for the Tracing preview, please complete this form.
Ping - Continuous Frequency
Some outages may be intermittent and last just a few seconds at a time, making them difficult to detect using relatively infrequent probes. The new Continuous Frequency options for our Ping monitor enable you to check the health of a resource every 200ms, 500ms, or 1000ms.
In case of network performance degradation, the Continuous Ping can be set to run a traceroute and capture additional network path details. This is useful in troubleshooting network issues. The traceroute can be set to run upon test failure or high packet loss by using the Debug on Error option, or it can be set to run once per minute as an additional monitor.
The Continuous Frequency options are available for the Ping test, as well as Node to Node tests using the Ping monitor on Enterprise nodes.
This feature is dependent on the Agent update; Enterprise nodes need to be updated to the latest version after the Needletail Agent release.
Traceroute - Explicit Congestion Notification (ECN) Support
The ECN field has taken on new importance due to the prevalence of Low Latency, Low Loss, and Scalable throughput (L4S) technology designed for extremely latency-sensitive applications (such as cloud games and cloud-rendered VR/AR). Conventionally, TCP/IP networks signal congestion by dropping packets. When ECN is successfully negotiated, an ECN-aware router may set a flag in the IP header to signal impending congestion, rather than dropping the packet.
With this update, the Traceroute monitor now allows you to specify the value of ECN to use when initiating a traceroute. The ECN value will be captured on each hop to detect any ECN value change. This option can be enabled in Advanced Settings within the test properties page.
This feature is dependent on the Agent update; Enterprise nodes need to be updated to the latest version after the Needletail Agent release.
Traceroute from Azure
The Traceroute monitor can now run from Azure-based nodes to capture network performance and detect potential issues. Traceroute works by sending probe packets with incremental TTL and then capturing metrics based on the packets received. Now you can run ICMP, UDP, TCP and InSession traceroute from Azure machines.
This feature is dependent on the Agent update, which is rolled out to our public nodes in stages after the release.
Enterprise Node Light Edition
Catchpoint Enterprise Nodes provide a powerful way to actively monitor various components of your applications and networks. For example, you can deploy them in your datacenter or cloud environment to test application releases that haven’t been deployed to the public, and you can test private networks by deploying them in locations public nodes can’t access.
The new Enterprise Node Light edition is extremely lightweight and flexible, making it easy to deploy across a wider range of network environments and locations. For example, if you’re responsible for monitoring the network for offices or retail locations, the new Enterprise Node can deploy as a container on your networking hardware, making it a cost-effective way to understand the network health without deploying additional hardware in each location.
To get access, please complete this form.
Reminder Frequency for RUM and Endpoints Alerts
Catchpoint’s RUM and Endpoint Alerts have been updated to include alert reminder frequencies, consistent with Synthetic Alerts. Now you will be able to select from the default (Never) and max (Daily) reminder frequency options for Warning and Critical alerts. Reminder frequency can be selected from the dropdown lists available in the Alert Properties blade.
Additional Features
- RUM data can now be viewed in per-second and per-minute time intervals in Explorer.
- Account Activity Page is now on the Symphony UI and includes a "last updated” column for each test listed in the table. The corresponding REST API v2 endpoint will be updated to match (including the ability to get daily activity) in the next release.
- Single object tests and JavaScript API tests will support HTTP/3 with the Agent update, which is rolled out to our public nodes in stages after the release.