Our new release theme for this year is fast cats, and we are hitting the ground “running” with a release named after the fastest cat of all – the Cheetah. Cheetahs are in fact the fastest land animal, and have been clocked at speeds greater than 60mph (96 km/h). Read the release notes below to see what's new in Cheetah.
Internet Sonar - Network Outages (Preview)
Internet Sonar is a generally available (GA) product in the Catchpoint portfolio that reports outages for hundreds of services and applications including CDNs, DNS providers, cloud platforms, and many more. Outages are primarily detected using a combination of active HTTP and DNS tests. With the Cheetah release we are expanding Internet Sonar to report network outages detected using network-centric tests, such as TCP and UDP traceroute.
Using Internet Sonar, you will now be able to detect outages in almost any Internet Service Provider (ISP), as well as in networks operated by CDNs, cloud providers, and other major internet entities. This capability is available as a preview currently, and we welcome your feedback to help make improvements in future releases.
To participate in the preview, Please fill out this form.
Playwright Test for Edge and Chrome (GA)
We are happy to announce that the Playwright Transaction test type is now GA. Playwright is a testing automation framework that supports major browsers, including Edge and Chrome. The Playwright test enables you to build multi-step browser transaction tests using standard Playwright scripts, and analyze the results in Records, Explorer, and Smartboard. We have also added NTLM authentication as an available authentication method with Playwright.
Playwright transaction test will be made available after the Agent update, which will be rolled out in the coming weeks.
Chrome Version Update
We have added support for Chrome 120 as a preview browser for Web, Transaction, and Instant Tests. It was released as an early stable version by Google on November 29, 2023 and includes several new features, including Theora video codec deprecation.
Chrome 120 is dependent on the Agent update, which will be rolled out in the coming weeks.
Internet Stack Map - Enhancements (Preview)
Customer-facing digital services typically rely on a complex set of internal and external services and applications communicating across the Internet. Internet Stack Map enables you to create and customize topological maps of your applications with both internal and external dependencies. It incorporates data from your tests as well as outage data from Internet Sonar to keep you up to date on application health and performance.
In this release, we have added many more features and capabilities to Stack Map, including:
- Automatic discovery of Custom services
- Highlighting services with active test alerts
- Ability to assign tests to custom services
- Automatic inclusion of CDN services in the front-end layer
Please fill out this form or reach out to your customer success manager if you would like to participate in the Internet Stack Map preview.
Web Page Instant Test (Preview)
Catchpoint’s webpagetest.org service provides detailed webpage performance analytics, including Lighthouse Scores, as well as advanced performance optimization tools to help you get the most out of your website. Now, many of the capabilities of webpagetest.org are available on-demand within the Catchpoint Portal as an Instant Test type. The preview version includes Web Page Instant Test creation, test history, test results, and API testing.
In upcoming releases, we plan to add more WebPageTest features, such as Opportunities and Experiments, which provide instant suggestions for optimizing webpage performance, along with Carbon Control and Records comparison.
Please fill out this form or reach out to your customer success manager if you would like to participate in the Web Page Instant Test preview.
Credential Library - Access Control Options
You can now choose which User Access options will be available when configuring credentials in the Library. The options include All Users and Custom List. Both options are available by default, but if you want to provide only one option or the other, you can do so by contacting Catchpoint Support and asking them to provision only the desired option.
This improvement makes it easier for companies with specific access requirements to ensure credentials in the Library are configured accordingly. For example, if access to credentials in your Library should always be limited to specific Catchpoint Portal users, removing the “All Users” option helps ensure that this policy is followed.
Control Center Changelog Updates
When a script changes, the Control Center changelog now highlights the changed value in both the old and new versions of the script. It also includes line breaks in script changes for improved readability. These updates make it easier to understand exactly what was changed in the script, helping you troubleshoot any problems that may arise.
RUM - Enhanced JavaScript Error Reporting
Catchpoint RUM captures performance metrics from actual user sessions in your website or application, so you can understand both individual experiences and trends across customer segments. In addition to reporting critical user experience metrics like core web vitals, RUM also reports JavaScript errors and can correlate them to user outcomes, such as bounces or page load aborts. To provide even greater visibility into errors encountered by real users, captured JS errors will now also include uncaught errors and exceptions inside promise/async functions.
RUM - New Alerting Options
LCP and CLS metrics
RUM users will now be able to set up alerts based on Core Web Vital metrics, including Largest Contentful Paint and Cumulative Layout Shift. This enables you to track and promptly respond to issues impacting load time or visual stability performance.
HTTP Status Codes
You can now select up to 20 http status codes to receive alert notifications for. With this option, you can immediately be notified when there are issues within your application that require development input, helping to reduce MTTR.
REST API
Division ID is now an available parameter for the following endpoints, enabling a consumer to collect data for specific divisions only:
- Product
- Folder
- Tests
- Alert
- Insight
- Test Template
- Schedule
- SLA
- Node Group