“Star light, star bright, first star I see tonight, I wish I may, I wish I might, have the feature I wish tonight.” We hope you get your feature wish in this Starlight release. If not, we’re still hard at work on more bright things coming in future releases. Stay tuned and look up!
MPLS Data in Traceroute Smartboard
The new MPLS filter allows you to select paths and view the performance of all traceroutes tagged with a specific MPLS label. This makes it easier for network teams to quickly identify bottlenecks within MPLS segments and isolate performance issues along complex, multi-label routes.
Internet Stack Map Updates
This release delivers a major update to Catchpoint’s Internet Stack Map, with improvements in design, functionality, and overall usability aimed at making it faster and easier for you to set up your stack map. This includes changes throughout the Edit mode, such as a new floating menu for adding and discovering services that you depend on in your internet stack.
In addition to these design changes, you can now use points to purchase Sonar services when adding them to your Stack Map. This enables you to leverage third-party outage data collected by Catchpoint’s Internet Sonar and automatically correlate incidents to services in your stack. Using points to license individual Sonar services is quick, easy, and doesn’t require a separate Sonar contract.
SSO User Access Scope
We’re introducing Access Scope Assertions to support complex, multi-level access control in SSO. This means that an individual portal user can have distinct roles and access types (product, test, RUM site, etc.) within each client or division, all applied automatically at login.
Availability: This feature is in limited preview while it is being extensively tested. We will roll it out soon after the release.
Tracing
Catchpoint Tracing provides end-to-end monitoring of distributed applications, capturing granular information on all the interactions between services and associated resources, such as databases, caches, queues, and streams.
External Services on Smartboard
With the recent updates, Smartboard now includes tracing data from external services. This allows teams to track the performance and impact of external services such as third-party product APIs used in their applications, including those from Google, Microsoft, OpenAI, Twilio, HubSpot, Stripe, and others.
Using Smartboard to monitor and troubleshoot external services, you can:
- View impacted services during external outages.
- Address dependent services when replacing or migrating external services.
- Identify the slowest and most error-prone external service.
- Detect performance outliers in external service calls.
Custom Dashboard Widgets: Additional Filters and Dimensions
Additional filters have been incorporated into custom dashboard widgets to enable plotting synthetic tracing data and real user tracing data together. The new filters include Trace Type, Error Type, Status Code, and Method. Furthermore, new dimensions such as Trace Type and Method are now available.
View & Setup Trace from Instant Test
You can now view or set up Tracing directly from an Instant Test. When you run a synthetic test that already has Tracing configured, you will be able to view the trace immediately from the Instant Test page. If Tracing is not set up, the system will provide an option to configure it automatically.
Highlight Spans in Trace Chart
This new feature highlights the relevant spans in the trace map and trace chart blade for selected transactions in the Smartboard.
Enable Tracing today to enjoy complimentary tracing for all your synthetic test runs!
REST API
The following REST API endpoint updates have been made:
- Allow users to configure voice call notifications for contacts
- Node Status (Online/Offline) is available for Nodes endpoints
REST API Versioning Policy
We support the current stable version of our REST API and the version just before it for 12 months after a new version becomes stable. As of July 11, 2024, REST API v3 is the current stable version. REST API v4 is available in preview and may include breaking changes as it evolves.
To stay supported and take advantage of the latest improvements, we recommend keeping your integration up to date with the latest version.
*Note: REST API Consumers should avoid strict deserialization of the API schema(s). Catchpoint reserves the right to expand the schema in future.
Additional Updates
- Removed the Email to SMS notification option for contacts due to cellular carriers blocking email to SMS
- Added alert conditions in both the alert log blade and Rest API responses
- Added the ability to convert transaction tests without having to make a copy of them first
Bug Fixes
- Regex can now be used for Zone rules in RUM
- Resolved cases where navigating to RUM Smartboard led to the old Smartboard
- Fixed issue in Mobile RUM Records where mobile device was listed as desktop
- Bottleneck and Availability metrics now displayed in table visualization for Host and Zone sub sources
- Removed test size override in advanced settings for DNS tests
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 in the help documentation.