Continuing our theme of fast cats, this release is named after the cougar (also known as panther, mountain lion, and puma). The cougar is a large cat native to the Americas. More nimble than most other wild cats, they are just as fast, reaching speeds of 40-50 mph. Their large paws and powerful hind legs make them excellent jumpers and adept climbers. We hope the features released in Cougar help you take down your prey… or at least improve the performance of your digital services!
Enterprise Node - Light Edition (GA)
Catchpoint Enterprise Nodes enable you to perform tests from locations within your organization. Companies typically deploy Enterprise Nodes as physical or virtual appliances in their data centers, branch offices, call centers, or brick-and-mortar stores. With this release, we are announcing general availability (GA) of a new software edition for Enterprise Nodes: Enterprise Light.
Enterprise Light is an extremely lightweight, flexible version of Enterprise Node, 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, you can easily deploy Enterprise Light as a container on existing network hardware, providing a cost-effective way to understand network health without deploying additional hardware in each location. Enterprise Light supports Catchpoint’s test types that primarily focus on network performance (ping, traceroute, and web object test).
Enterprise Light supports container deployment (e.g. Docker), and both Intel and ARM architectures, making it suitable to run on low-cost hardware such as Raspberry Pi.
Stack Map
Discover the power of Catchpoint's Internet Stack Map! Easily create topological maps that visualize your services and their dependencies across the Internet Stack.
In this release, we've enhanced Stack Map with the ability to filter data by your preferred geo locations. We've also added a new single Layer, Service, and Test view in the analyze blade for improved insights and ease of use.
Stack Map is fully integrated with Internet Sonar and is included with any purchase of Internet Sonar.
Internet Sonar
Internet Sonar provides visibility into the network and all services in your Internet Stack so that when incidents occur you can answer the question, “is it me or something else?”
We've made various improvements to Internet Sonar in this release, including:
- ISP incidents are now reported via API
- Alerts can now be filtered by severity
- Overview Dashboard timeline filters services based on Stack Map and Test filters
- Added new services Apigee, Mashery, and Mulesoft
- Performance improvements for API and UI queries
Duplicate Dashboards
By popular demand, we have added the ability to duplicate dashboards. Now, you can easily create new dashboards by duplicating existing ones, simplifying your process and reducing the time it takes to create new dashboards. For example, this enables you to create a custom dashboard for one service and use that as a template for other services by duplicating it (and changing as needed), instead of recreating the same dashboard from scratch each time.
This feature can be used to duplicate all dashboard types, including regular Custom Dashboards, Stack Maps, and Earth View Dashboards.
RUM Frustration Metrics
As part of our Real User Monitoring (RUM) offering, we now support the following Frustration metrics:
-
Error Clicks - When a user clicks on something (like a button or link) and it returns a JavaScript error
-
Dead Clicks - When someone clicks on an element of a webpage, but nothing happens. It’s like pressing a button on a remote control, but the TV doesn’t respond
-
Rage Clicks - When a user gets frustrated or angry with a slow-loading page or unresponsive feature and clicks three or more times in less than a second
-
Thrashed Cursor - When a user moves their mouse erratically or in a circle, which could indicate that they are confused, lost, or frustrated waiting for the page to load
You can view these metrics in RUM Smartboard, analyze them in Explorer, and even create alerts on them in Control Center. This functionality can provide valuable insight into customer annoyance and frustration when interacting with your website or application and can help you identify what may be causing their frustration, leading to improved customer satisfaction and engagement.
Note: This feature relies on the latest RUM tag, version 4.0.1, which can be found in your RUM site properties under Tracking Code.
Tracing
With Catchpoint Tracing you gain end-to-end visibility into distributed applications across serverless architectures, containers, and virtual machines. Use it to analyze resource usage, troubleshoot and optimize performance with our latest enhancements, and empower your team to make faster decisions and ensure a seamless digital experience.
Overview Dashboard
The Tracing Overview Dashboard provides a system-level architecture view of all the trace applications and associated services of a system. It highlights the overall health and state of the system along with information to identify which services have issues or errors. Features include:
-
System Navigation pane, where you can select which system to view
-
Interactive timeline showing error volume and average response time, or other key metrics
-
Service and system scores showing the health of individual services and systems
-
Ability to choose between system map, table, and tile views
The system map view shows you the associations and transactions between services for the selected system. From there, you can select a cluster or flow view, and see the details of each interaction and service on the map. Inactive services – those without any transactions in the selected timeframe - are also identified.
System Management in Control Center
System Management allows you to define the view in Overview Dashboard by creating tracing systems and assigning services to each one. With System Management in Control Center, you can do the following:
- Create a system with shared services
- Assign services to multiple systems
- Automatically detect new services under Catchpoint System
- Set a default system to view in Overview Dashboard
- Add or remove services from a system
- Activate/deactivate systems
WebPageTest Instant Test
WebPageTest's gold-standard web performance testing capabilities, combined with Catchpoint's market-leading Internet Performance Monitoring platform, enables you to enhance website performance and deliver an exceptional user experience. In this release we have enhanced our WebPageTest offering with the following features.
Opportunities & Experiments
Optimize your site’s performance with confidence, knowing the potential impact of each change before implementing it on your live site by using Opportunities and Experiments. Opportunities and Experiments provide diagnostics to identify performance bottlenecks in your website. It analyzes various aspects of your site, such as page speed, code efficiency, and user experience, and suggests optimizations to improve performance so you can make data-driven decisions on which optimizations to implement. Before making any changes to your code, try our no-code experiments to test different optimizations. This helps you quickly assess the impact of suggested changes before modifying your site’s actual code.
Full Video in Waterfall
A video in the waterfall tab provides a visual representation of the loading process of your web page, assisting you in identifying any delays or inefficiencies in the loading process. A unique video is correlated to each individual run and view of WebPage test, allowing you to see how quickly each element of your page is loaded and rendered, and identify any areas where there may be problems.
Additional Locations
Location matters when monitoring digital experience. Catchpoint now offers expanded coverage for running Web Page Instant Tests from various geographical locations. With this enhancement, you can perform tests from 35 different locations across six continents. This broader coverage allows you to assess the performance of your web pages from a wider range of perspectives, providing insights into how your website or application performs for users in different regions around the world.
Playwright & Puppeteer Monitors
Playwright and Puppeteer are cross-browser tools for advanced browser automation and testing. With Catchpoint's Playwright and Puppeteer test types, you can build multi-step transaction tests to capture the performance of a complete user journey on a website.
Popup Handling with Playwright
Catchpoint's Playwright monitor now supports multiple windows. This allows you to monitor user journeys that may open a new window when interacting with the main page. Critical use-cases, like sign-in using third-party credentials, or text-based chat applications, are now easily scriptable.
Client Certificate
Playwright and Puppeteer support the use of Personal Certificates for URLs that require them. This allows you to pass custom client certificates within a test. These certificates can be applied to the test URL and to any child URL using custom headers.
Note: These changes are dependent on Agent release.
Node-to-Node Test
The Node-to-Node Test enables you to set up a mesh of tests across several Enterprise Nodes to monitor network metrics such as packet loss, latency, and jitter.
One-Minute Test Run Frequency
Node-to-Node scheduled tests now support a run frequency of one minute. This enhancement allows for more frequent monitoring of crucial network paths. This feature will be accessible to Enterprise and Enterprise (Pt) nodes only.
Custom Dashboard Widgets Timeframes
The custom dashboard feature enables you to design a dashboard tailored specifically to your requirements. The updated Node-to-Node widget now supports multiple timeframes, allowing you to show data from up to the last 24 hours.
Enterprise Branch Nodes - Updates to Packages and Node Properties
We have made the following changes to Enterprise Branch nodes:
-
You can now add any Enterprise package and select customer hardware (branch) while adding Enterprise Node contracts in Client Properties Page
-
You can add only one package for each instance type in Enterprise Node contracts
-
In the Node properties page, model options available for Enterprise Branch network type have been updated to A1 and A2
-
The Node Type option has been removed from the Package Detail page
Endpoint - Breakdown by endpoint in alerts
Email notifications can now include the list of endpoints which have triggered alerts, along with details such as endpoint alias, metric value, and a link to the Endpoint Smartboard. This makes it much easier to quickly identify problem Endpoints and begin troubleshooting. To include these details, simply select "Apply to each Endpoint" in Endpoint Breakdown when creating alerts. These details are also available via Alert Webhook.
Rest API v2/v3 Updates
The following updates are included with this release:
- REST API v3 is now Stable and ready for production use. As a result, REST API v2 will no longer receive any changes or enhancements after this release
- REST API v2 change log endpoints are retired; please use REST API v3 for any change log endpoints going forward
-
Added filter parameters for test data endpoints
- Endpoint: PATCH/v2/tests/{testId}
-
Added the ability to move a test from one folder to another
- Endpoint: GET/v2.5/tests/explorer/aggregated and GET/v2.5/tests/explorer/raw
-
Added Create RUM Favorite Chart endpoint
- Endpoint: POST/ v2.5/realuser/favoritechart/<chart_id>
-
Added Delete RUM Favorite Chart endpoint:
- Endpoint: DELETE/ v2.5/realuser/favoritechart/<chart_id>
- Endpoint: GET/ v2.5/realuser/site
Added Real User App endpoint, that includes ID, Name, Status, Type, License, Change Date.
NOTE: REST API Consumers should avoid strict deserialization of the API schema(s). Catchpoint reserves the right to expand the schema in future.
Additional Features
-
The additional monitor has been configured to use Traceroute Insession as the default setting
-
Continuous Ping monitor now triggers debug on error traceroute in-between of a run. This helps to capture diagnostic information about the micro-outages that last for a few seconds
-
Change Log – Large changes in tests will reflect “See Changes” and when selected the changes will open in a new blade
-
You can now view the agent edition of newly added Enterprise Nodes on the Instance Page. Standard for Enterprise Nodes and Light for Enterprise Light nodes
Catchpoint Agent Release
Some of the features in the release (where noted) require the latest version of the Catchpoint Agent to be running on the selected Node. The Catchpoint Agent rollout involves two dimensions:
-
Public Nodes managed by Catchpoint: Agent rollout on public nodes takes place in stages following each release. Agent release announcements are posted here: https://nodestatus.catchpoint.com.
-
Private Enterprise Nodes managed by customers: Customers can upgrade Enterprise Nodes any time at their convenience. We advise customers to upgrade Enterprise nodes promptly after each release to benefit from the new feature functionality. Instructions for upgrading Enterprise nodes can be found here.