Continuing our theme of fast cats, this release is named after the tiger. The tiger is a large cat known for its iconic black and orange stripes. Typically found in Asia, tigers are capable of bursts of speed of up to 40 mph (64 kph), making them formidable predators. Pounce into action with features in the Tiger release!
Node-to-Node Tests between Enterprise and Public Nodes
The Node-to-Node Test enables you to set up a mesh of traceroute or ping tests among multiple nodes to monitor network performance and reachability using metrics like packet loss, latency, and jitter. This is typically used with enterprise nodes to help identify communication issues in your network, between your data centers, or any other locations where your nodes may reside.
Node-to-Node tests now support testing between Enterprise nodes and public node types including backbone, last mile, wireless, and cloud. This allows you to easily test the network bidirectionally from more locations, such as between datacenters and cloud providers, or from one cloud provider to another. To learn more about Node-to-Node tests, please see the help documentation.
Internet Sonar Enhancements
Internet Sonar detects outages in major services across the internet and correlates them with the services you’re testing in your Internet Stack. When incidents occur, this helps you to quickly answer “is it me or something else?”
Filter Sonar Dashboards to a Stack Map
This release includes the ability to filter Sonar overview and custom dashboards to a Stack Map. This improvement lets you see outages only for services represented in the Stack Map. Services without outages are listed as “without incidents” for added clarity. If your Stack Map includes region filters, those are also represented in the filtered Sonar view.
Other Sonar Updates
Other improvements added to Sonar in this release include:
- Sonar overview and custom dashboards can now filter to service categories
- Sonar overview UX improvements: City “outage” dots now have a new style and a count of aggregated incidents for a location
- Incident correlations in test records now indicate why the incident is correlated with your test
- Ability to alert on ISP incidents is now included
Stack Map Enhancements
Stack Map enables you to easily create topological maps that visualize your services and their dependencies across the Internet Stack. In this release, we have added correlation of Ping and Traceroute test types, as well as Ping RTT and Packet Loss Metrics throughout Stack Map. This improves your visibility of how network problems impact your service performance. We have also made various usability improvements throughout the Analyze Blade and Stack Map View
Alert on Core Web Vitals
The ability to alert on Core Web Vitals has been added to the test types listed below. These can be configured in Control Center along with other test alerts.
- Web (Chrome, Playback, Mobile Playback, Mobile)
- Transaction (Chrome, Mobile)
- Playwright (Chrome)
- Puppeteer (Chrome)
- HTML Code (Chrome, Mobile)
Playwright & Puppeteer Test Enhancements
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.
Proxy Authentication
Enterprise environments often route web traffic through proxies to maintain security and enforce access controls. Playwright and Puppeteer now support proxy authentication, ensuring that all outgoing requests are authorized and logged appropriately. This enables organizations to maintain robust security protocols and comply with regulatory requirements.
Request and DNS Override
Playwright and Puppeteer are enhanced to allow request and DNS override with HTTP header intervention. This can be helpful for various testing scenarios, as you can alter page-loading behavior without having to recode your applications. For example, requests can be forced to load from specific Content Delivery Networks (CDNs) to compare their performance, or you can test image optimization solutions.
Traceroute Test Updates
Improved Destination Metrics
The Traceroute test initiates a traceroute command to map out the network path, and sends several additional pings to the destination to accurately gauge network performance characteristics including Round Trip Time, Packet Loss, and Jitter. With this release, Round Trip Time and Packet Loss metric will now rely on destination ping data rather than the last hop from the traceroute command. Jitter has always been calculated using destination pings. Destination ping metrics are derived from 20 ping probes, making them more accurate and reliable than the traceroute's last hop (which used just 3 ping probes by default). This will be used across the Catchpoint portal in Smartboard, Records, Explorer, and Alerts.
Alert on Jitter
The Traceroute test can now generate alerts based on the Jitter metric. This is helpful in identifying network performance issues that may impact real-time applications.
RUM INP Elements
Real User Monitoring captures the Interaction to Next Paint (INP) metric, which indicates how long it took for the webpage to respond to an action by the user. Now we’ve made it easier to pinpoint the specific elements in the page that may be causing slow performance. The element breakdown in the Records waterfall chart can help you quickly determine which resource caused the INP to go up, and to identify the ten elements contributing the most to deficient performance. This allows developers and UX designers to identify and address bottlenecks quickly.
Deprecation of FID Metric
The transition from First Input Delay (FID) to Interaction to Next Paint (INP) as a Core Web Vitals metric marks a significant shift in how user experience is assessed in web development.
With Chrome officially ending support for FID, it has been removed from the list of available metrics in the Catchpoint portal, as well as the API. However, you can still access historical FID data via our portal, which can be useful for comparative analysis.
INP is now the primary metric for assessing how a webpage responds to user interactions. It does so by measuring the time between a user’s interaction and the next visual update on the page. INP data is captured with Real User Monitoring (RUM).
WebPageTest Instant Test Updates
Catchpoint’s WebPageTest, available within the Catchpoint portal, is the gold standard for web performance testing. In this release, we have enhanced the WebPageTest offering with the following features.
Carbon Control
Monitoring a site’s net carbon emissions represents a major step towards sustainability in the digital world. Catchpoint now enables you to track your site’s carbon emission and understand the environmental impact of your online presence. By running tests from different geographical locations, you can evaluate how the carbon footprint varies based on location and traffic origin. View your Page Weight to estimate the carbon emission per visit.
You’ll also receive targeted suggestions for reducing your carbon footprint, including strategies like lazy loading, caching, and image optimization. You can test suggested optimizations using no-code experiments to measure the real impact of these changes on your site’s performance and carbon emissions. This is a terrific way to engage with environmentally conscious practices in web development and adhere to emerging industry guidelines.
Waterfall Details
With the addition of waterfall details, you can monitor and optimize web performance more effectively by reviewing detailed insights into requests, connections, and media sizes. Key features include comprehensive request details, a connection view for analyzing network bottlenecks, a request table for comparing metrics, image size reviews for optimization, and customizable waterfall parameters for deeper performance analysis
Enterprise Nodes
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
Ubuntu Support
We are excited to announce that our Enterprise Nodes now support Ubuntu. Ubuntu is a popular open-source version of Linux known for its user-friendliness, security, and extensive community support. To install a node on Ubuntu, please see the help documentation.
NOTE: These changes are dependent on Agent release.
Remove Instances
You can now easily remove Enterprise Node Instances directly via the portal UI and via the new API endpoint “Remove Instance.” Once an instance has been removed, the license will be automatically updated, reducing administrative overhead on your end.
Endpoint Updates
Alert on Processes
You can now proactively monitor the local processes impacting Endpoint device performance by configuring alerts for CPU and memory utilization. This feature is applicable for Alerts on Endpoint, Location, and Label.
Additional Metrics in Alert Webhook
The Alerts Webhook now supports an extensive set of Endpoint-related metrics, including Endpoint label, CPU & Memory utilization, Wi-Fi metrics, and call quality metrics, enabling you to analyze and monitor your operations more efficiently.
REST API v3
Several new and updated endpoints have been introduced in REST API v3 to enhance functionality and performance. You can find the comprehensive list of these endpoints, along with detailed documentation and usage examples in our help documentation.
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New Parameter on Alert Endpoint: GET request on /tests/alerts
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Bulk update Test Status: PATCH request to /tests/status
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Bulk update Product Status: PATCH request to /products/status
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Remove Instance: DELETE/v3.1/instances
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
- ${jitter} macro has been added to the Data Webhook
- Control Center: Changelog support added to Tracing Systems and Services
- Total Blocking Time (TBT) metric now available for Edge scheduled and instant tests
Bug Fixes
- Entering special characters for a field in node detail page caused page to crash.
- Mismatch in data between Sonar custom map widget and public share link.
- Sonar intermittently showing no ISP incidents for the timeframe, but downtime bars shown in the timeline.
- Mismatch between count of available Enterprise nodes and available licenses.
- Rest API V2 Get call returns a 400 Bad request error.
- Playwright or Transaction Chrome tests returned incorrect Filmstrip frequency when enabled.
- In certain cases, the network tab was broken for ping test with debug primary host on failure.
- BGP Smartboard reporting duplicate events for IPv6.
- In a few edge cases, the Sankey chart, hop prior to destination is listed as destination hop.
- Traceroute instant test, “DSCP value not supported" error occurs in some rare circumstances.
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:
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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.
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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.