This release is named after Swifts, a family of birds that are known for their fast flying and acrobatic abilities, which they use to catch insects in flight. They typically have long wings, small legs, and relatively small bodies. Spending most of their life flying, swifts are able to remain airborne for months at a time, even sleeping in flight!
Please note that due to the month of November being critical for retail and infrastructure companies, we will not be releasing the Swift agent to our public nodes until early December.
Internet Sonar
This release includes several significant updates to Internet Sonar to help improve detection and reporting of third-party service outages.
Outage Severity
This release introduces a new attribute in outage reports which ranks the severity of outages as low, medium, or high, helping to prioritize outages with the greatest impact to you. The severity of an outage is measured by factoring in the number of locations reporting it, total % downtime, number of test runs, and number of IPs affected.
Enriched Data
Internet Sonar now detects outages using a larger set of synthetic test data and can report on even more services. With this expanded pool of data, Sonar can detect outages more quickly and accurately, and from more locations across the world.
Alert Log
Sonar alerts are now included in the alert log so you can view all third-party service outage alerts in one list.
Note for Trial or Preview Customers: outages that occurred prior to this release will not be displayed by Sonar.
Internet Stack Map (Preview*)
Customer-facing digital services are composed of a complex mesh of internal and external systems, and most websites and SaaS applications rely on numerous third-party services and applications (CDN, DNS, Payment, etc.) Many of the services your applications depend on are outside of your control and visibility.
Internet Stack Map enables you to create and customize topological maps of your applications’ internal and external dependencies, and to see how each component affects overall service performance. You can create a Stack Map from the Dashboard menu and populate it with custom services that are fed by your existing synthetic tests, as well as services monitored by Internet Sonar.
*The Internet Stack Map preview is available to customers that have Internet Sonar enabled.
Test Suites
It is often beneficial to monitor an application using multiple tests of different types to get a complete picture of its performance. Test Suites allow you to create a set of preconfigured tests for a specific application all at once, rather than manually creating each test individually. Just configure a few basic settings and the Suite will be created with all tests up and running.
In this release, Catchpoint provides built-in Test Suites for Google Cloud services. In the future, additional Test Suites will be made available for other applications and services. Each Google Test Suite you create will include a DNS Experience, Ping TCP, and Web Object test.
The following Google services will be available in this release.
- Big Query
- Cloud Spanner
- Cloud Storage
- Compute Engine
Do you use other services that you'd like Test Suites to support? You can let us know by creating a feature request in the Share Your Feedback section of the Resource Center (in the "?" menu).
Control Center Enhancements
When creating a new test in Control Center, you will now have three options:
- Create and configure a new test from scratch under the Blank Test tab.
- Create a test based on an existing template under the Script Template tab.
- Add a suite of tests for a specific service using the Test Suite tab.
Tracing - OpenTelemetry Support (Preview*)
Tracing will soon support OpenTelemetry SDK. OpenTelemetry is an open-source project that provides instrumentation to enable observability in software applications, standardizing how this data is collected and transmitted, and facilitating interoperability between different services and tools. This allows for a more holistic view of system performance and behavior.
To sign up for the Tracing preview, please complete this form.
- This feature is dependent on the Agent update, which we plan to roll out to our public nodes in December.
Continuous Ping Records Enhancements
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. Now in Records we display a new area chart for the ping latency and packet loss at a 200ms resolution. This helps discover issues and troubleshoot the network faster.
Interaction to Next Paint (INP) Metric for RUM
Google has introduced INP as a Core Web Vital metric that assesses a web page's overall responsiveness to user interactions by measuring the latency between any mouse-clicks, screen-taps, or key-presses and the resulting updates to the screen. INP is now available for RUM Alerting, Explorer visualizations, and Custom Dashboards.
Terraform Registry
With the Catchpoint Terraform provider, now available in the Terraform Registry, users can manage Web, API, Transaction, DNS, SSL, BGP, Traceroute, and Ping tests with minimal configuration, making it easier than ever for developers to integrate Catchpoint data with Terraform.
Traceroute Enhancements
Explicit Congestion Notification (ECN) Enhancement*
The ECN field has taken on new importance due to Low Latency, Low Loss, and Scalable throughput (L4S) technology designed for extremely latency-sensitive applications (such as cloud games and cloud-rendered VR/AR). The ECN Mechanism involves two levels: IP and TCP. In the previous release we added monitoring of ECN changes along the path that occur at the IP level. Now, we have extended support to monitor ECN at the TCP level as well. This allows us to check whether the destination supports ECN at the transport layer.
The ECN data can be seen in the hop-by-hop visual in the Network section of the Smartboard.
Accurate ECN (AccECN) Support*
AccECN has two fundamental differences as compared to Classic ECN. With Classic ECN it was only possible to know whether any congestion was experienced along the path. With AccECN, we know the exact number of packets that the destination received with each IP-ECN value. This helps with understanding how long the congestion was experienced and how many packets were affected. ECN data can be viewed within the Records Page and Smartboard. You can select Accurate or Classic ECN when enabling ECN in a test’s Advanced Settings.
New Quick UDP Internet Connection (QUIC) Monitor*
QUIC is a general-purpose transport layer network protocol which improves web performance and security. QUIC was designed to address the shortcomings of TCP (Transmission Control Protocol) and provide security features like authentication and encryption that are typically handled by TLS (Transport Layer Security). QUIC has other features such as multiplexing, reduced handshake latency, and more.
The new Traceroute QUIC monitor is available for Traceroute and Node-to-Node tests. It can also be run as a Traceroute instant test and as an additional monitor.
Differentiated Services Code Point (DSCP) Support*
DSCP is a field in the IP (Internet Protocol) header used to specify the level of priority for a particular packet as it traverses a network. This is used to prioritize traffic for services such as voice or streaming media which require minimal latency.
The DSCP value can now be set for any Traceroute monitor, and changes in the DSCP value across the network path can be observed within Smartboard and Records.
- These features are dependent on the Agent update, which we plan to roll out to our public nodes in December.
REST API Enhancements
Versioning
REST API major and minor versioning are invaluable tools for managing changes and updates to custom applications. Going forward, our REST API will be available in major versions (e.g., 3.x) which signify significant, potentially backward-incompatible changes, while the minor versions (e.g., 3.1) indicate smaller, backward-compatible improvements or additions. The version numbers can be used to understand the impact of changes and ensure compatibility with your existing code when integrating with the REST API.
Endpoint Updates
- REST API v2 Endpoint – Usage Report: Retrieve usage reports by day, week, month and quarter via API.
- REST API v3 Endpoint – Alerts: Alerts endpoint now returns BGP-related details such as Peer AS, AS Path and Origin AS.
- REST API v3 Endpoint – Enterprise Nodes: Chrome version endpoints now return chrome version information and update the chrome versions for the specified Enterprise Node.
Workforce Experience: Teams and Zoom Monitoring
Devices running the latest version of the Catchpoint User Experience app with packet capture enabled will now capture call quality metrics for all Microsoft Teams and Zoom calls. With improved call quality metrics, users can analyze the performance of Microsoft Teams and Zoom calls from Endpoint Smartboard.
Additional Features
- Display Dashboards from Different Divisions: Create and view dashboards across divisions from Client level.
- Contact Page: Added last login date to contacts table.
- Account Activity Page: Now includes "last updated” field for each test listed, and the corresponding REST API v3 endpoint now provides the ability to retrieve information by day.