Catchpoint IPM, Internet Traffic and Application Availability | DevOps Dialogues: Insights & Innovations – EP11

Hello, and welcome to this episode of DevOps Dialogue. My name is Paul Nashwa. I'm the practice lead of the app dev practice at the Futurum Group.

Today I'm with Catchpoint, and we're here to talk about IPM and internet, uh, traffic and application availability and all sorts of goodness. Right? So, I'm here joined by Maddi and Brandon Maddi, would you like to introduce yourself?

Yeah. Thank you so much for having us. So, my name is me, I'm the co-founder and CEO of Catchpoint.

Uh, we started Catchpoint about 15 years ago. Prior to that, I was at, uh, 11 years at this company called DoubleClick that was acquired by Google doing all kind of stuff from breaking the biggest ad serving network system in the world to fixing it. And I guess I'm in inhaled for the rest of my life in monitoring.

Excellent. Well, thank you for being here, Brendan. I'm Brandon Dela, senior Solutions engineer at Catchpoint.

Um, I've been at Catchpoint for over 10 years now, helping our clients and prospects, um, find the value of Catchpoint and, and how we can ensure resilience for their, for their platforms. Excellent. Thanks for being here today.

And you know, I I, listening to your story and listening to everything that you're talking about in our briefings that we had conversations, it, it, it amazes me that, uh, Catchpoint isn't front and center as a priority for organizations versus an afterthought to some organizations. Uh, why don't we start by, let's talk about what Catchpoint is. Sure.

So Catchpoint, uh, mission is to help customers run their businesses better through the internet, right? Mm-Hmm. So, I mean, to make it as simple, if, when I tell my mom what I do besides play with computers is I make the internet better, and I help companies we work with deliver on their promise to their users over the internet.

And so that's what we do. How do we do it well by providing telemetry and, and signals so they can know that there is a problem and they can fix it before too many users get impact, right? That's the gist and high level.

Yeah, that makes sense. That makes sense. Do you wanna add anything to that or?

Yeah, I mean, I think, I think the, at the core of Catchpoint, um, we are a internet performance monitoring solution. It's, it's a lot different than what, um, your, your typical monitoring solutions do and, and, and provide for you. Um, and obviously we can go a little deeper into that, how it compares to a PM, but at the core, uh, it's an internet performance monitoring company, ensuring internet resilience for any digital service that you may touch on your day-to-day basis.

I'm going to add something here. So Brandon talked about internet resilience or resilience. So what, what is resilience?

Resilience is the ability to know that you're going to have a problem and that you can recover from that problem. That's what resilience is, right? Being resilient is, I am going to make an omelet and then I'm going to eat my omelet.

Right? So how do we help? Well, by allowing you to see where you have weaknesses and where you have, uh, problems.

You can, when you know something, when you know where the problem is, then you can take corrective action. If you're completely blind to where there is a problem, like head in the sand, it's like, eh, everything is fine. And then you have people on Twitter say, Hey, I can't buy this thing where, hey, I can't check in here, or whatever.

Uh, that's, that's really what internet resilience is, is the ability to understand that something will happen. 'cause Inevitably it will. Exactly.

And if you don't know where it's coming from, there is no way in hell you can fix it in time. Yeah, Absolutely. Absolutely.

Well, I was, I was wondering if we were gonna change this into a cooking show talking about omelets, but that's okay. Uh, but, you know, I think I make a mean omelet. Well, that sounds good.

You have to get the recipe. Sounds good. So, you know, when I think about, uh, the applications and I think about the internet, right?

And we, and we talked about how the internet is the new application infrastructure, um, makes a lot of sense, but I don't think people really fully understand what that means. Um, when we talk about it from a Catchpoint's perspective, what does that mean? So the biggest thing is from an end user perspective.

com or Microsoft or, or, or your favorite whatever website that might be. If you have a good wifi connectivity, if you have a good internet connectivity, et cetera, et cetera, that user experience is going to be flawless. The page is going to show up on your browser, you're going to be delighted, right?

And you're going to have a good user experience with that brand. You're going to keep building that trust between you and that brand because they're respecting the most important thing that you have, which is time. That's one thing that doesn't grow anywhere, right?

Right. So I think brands need to respect the customer that they work with, that they're serving. So that's the most important thing behind the scenes, that loading of that webpage took hundreds, hundreds and hundreds of requests behind the scene to happen.

Mm-Hmm. There is a DNS lookup, there is a connection to a server. There is like fetching an image from here.

There is fetching a Java script from here, and that JavaScript needs to be optimized so it doesn't blow up your computer, all that kind of stuff. So when we talk about, what we talk about is that, can we help companies understand what it really takes to deliver that flawless, delightful user experience to Paul 24 7, not between two and 4:00 PM not at 6:00 AM when there is nobody online, but 24 7 mm-Hmm. And, uh, so our job is really to, to shine that, that, that, that, uh, yeah.

And be able to show them the path that is the most congested or the, the things that are breaking that user experience, but it's really about respecting the user. At the end of the day, if I have to again, explain this to my mom, it's really about we help companies make sure they respect you mom as a, as a, as a human being. Yeah.

I I like where you're, where you're kind of going there, you know, as you're respecting the people's time for especially, uh, you know, when it comes to looking for information and such, it's, it's critical that they, they that that the response time is there. I, I think when we were talking earlier, Brandon, we were, I was hearing you talk about the fact that the new downtime is delay. Yeah.

Right? It's not about actual downtime. So it's not about things not actually loading because something's maybe broken in the backend, but it's delay and you lose, you lose clients.

So what does that mean to the customer experience? Yeah. I think what that means, obviously it came with the, just the overall modernization of, of applications, right?

Moving away from, okay, I, I control the server, I control the code, you know, I control that data center to, I am now leveraging someone else to do all that for me. And unfortunately, that means I no longer have the insight that I used to have. So when we talk about, you know, the internet being your new application infrastructure is, is essentially that you have new cloud environments that you need to keep an eye on.

You have multiple DNS providers, multiple CDN providers, and they're doing their monitoring on their own right. But in today's world of, of, you know, ensuring customers and, and our hams having a great experience, um, it's in, it's important to do that monitoring on your own as well. Right.

Just to follow up on, on that, uh, when we talk about slows the new down is because overall, the past 15 years, 20 years, a lot of improvements have been made to ensure infrastructure resilience, right? The cloud didn't exist. Uh, data centers have become so much better.

There are so many things that have been done to, to ensure better reliability. But with the complexity explosion with like, uh, now moving to, as Brandon said, to third party cloud compute companies, et cetera, et cetera. Now the new down is slow that slowness, because before it was monolithic, you had, you had everything running in one building, it was fine.

Today, if you go and load CNN or your favorite news website, you will see it's hundreds of requests going in so many directions. Sometimes we catch requests going to China from the us like, why is a US user going to China? Well, because there is a third party ad tracking company or something like that.

And that can have an impact on you. Absolutely. So, you know, when I think about the DevOps community, right?

And I think about a lot of the requests come in, especially on the weekends when things are slow and maybe at two o'clock in the morning, right? Yeah. Uh, that's, so that's not what, uh, people want, right?

Um, when they think about the tool sets, uh, a lot of what you've been talking about, um, on both of you've been talking about is, is the monitoring solutions, right? Mm-Hmm. And looking at how the applications are being monitored, how they're running.

There's also some confusion here in the market, I think, uh, from listening to different organizations around what, um, you know, an A PM is versus an IPM. Um, maybe we should just spend a couple of minutes talking about that. We had to give you an analogy that the customer gave me true story.

Um, and, uh, customer in New York. So the analogy is based on New York. Um, he said, you know, with, with you guys, meaning, uh, he was talking about Catchpoint is, uh, before Catchpoint, somebody would tell me there is a fire in Manhattan.

Good luck. Mm-Hmm. It's a big city, right?

With Catchpoint, I am told that there is a fire in 36 in Lexington on the third floor door to the left. And oh, by the way, don't forget, there are three cats. That's literally analogy from a customer.

Very granular. Very granular, right? So I think the, again, it's not one versus the other.

I hate when people put things into sure. Black or white. This is about, uh, you need a PM because a PM gives you all the capabilities and all the infrastructure level monitoring all the, all the depth that you need to understand the relationship between code to C-P-U-C-P-U to whatever, right?

And so that is still a requirement. We try to understand a different part of the equation, which is why are things not working, uh, besides outside of your firewall, right? Right.

And outside of the things that you have a lot of control over, because there is no way in hell if, let's say that you're running a, uh, a website, there is no way in hell you can knock at somebody else vendor and say, Hey, can you put my a PM agent? They're not going to let you do that. So how are you going to be, have a view on things that you can't control?

And nobody's going to let you run some vendor agent so you can have a better visibility. Sure, sure. So what you're touching on though is like this holistic view of the application, understanding down to the device, down to the specifics, uh, having full logging and tracing, that kind of goes through and, and understanding, um, but I use those words logging and tracing.

Right. And one of the things I want to kind of bring up here, and maybe we can address it, is real quick, is the difference between where a Catchpoint fits within the observability space, because observability is a big market, right? Right.

And it says a lot of different pieces. Correct. Um, what does it, what does it mean from that perspective?

Yeah, I think where we, um, fit in is obviously, as Medi already alluded to, it's, it's a complimentary solution, complimentary set of tools, and again, focusing on the customer first. Um, and when it comes to overall observability, that's obviously a shift that a lot of companies are making now, and understanding that yes, the customer, if if the customer's not having a great experience, it's directly tied to our bottom line, our revenue, and potentially our, our own paychecks at the end of the day, right? So, so I think in the overall pie of observability, IPM is required, and especially focusing from the outside in from that, uh, customer perspective.

That makes sense. I had a, I had a meeting with the customer a few weeks ago in Atlanta, and this span more than $20 million on observability and, uh, with one particular vendor alone, right? Okay.

So it's a lot, it's a big, uh, big check. And the question he asked me is like, why are you the first one to catch problems? Then he's like, because you're not spending money the right way, but the right direction.

Um, so the, the most important thing, and I I, and forget, I'm wearing, uh, my Catchpoint hat for a second. I know it's a little bit, uh, hard, but at the end of the day, I keep telling this to people is you need to monitor from where it matters the most. You users are not living inside your app.

Yeah. They're not. So you can monitor all you want inside the applications, inside the infrastructure, et cetera.

At the end of the day, the required, one of the most important thing is you need to understand the voice of the customer. And if you don't have that, I don't know what you're doing. Yeah.

You're just reactive. You're just waiting for, at that point, you know, my, my recommendation is actually shut down all monitoring systems. Shut everything down because you're wasting a lot of money.

Just put something on your call centers and see if the phone is ringing up. Oh, yeah. Or smoke signals.

Let's go back to that. It sounds like there's an opportunity to have a discussion around ai, and I know we're about 14 minutes into this conversation. I had to bring up ai, but I, you know, I, as we're wrapping up here, uh, you know, I'm really, uh, excited about this.

Yeah. Uh, opportunity. I'm really excited about the, the what, you know, what you're bringing to the table here.

Uh, really it has a lot to do with the market and the market's maturity. Correct. Maturing, and where, uh, you know, wherever the audience is on their maturity curve and their, and their, you can meet them where they are in their journey.

Absolutely. Uh, but, but I encourage the audience to that thinking about this approach proactively versus reactively is important. Yeah.

Right. That's, and with that, I do want to thank you for your thank per thank your time and your perspectives. Thank you.

This has been really great and I wanna thank the audience for attending. If they, um, if the audience wants to get started, where would they get started? I would highly encourage people to go to our website.

There. You can view demos, you can also interact with our blogs. We have some amazing content, uh, but uh, on LinkedIn, uh, Twitter, X, uh, but I think our blog is, is fantastic.

There's, uh, some amazing content that can get you started in your journey and that you set it very nicely. It's a maturity, like we start with availability, then suddenly people start thinking about performance and then reliability, which is the ability to consistently deliver on both availability and performance. So, Excellent.

Excellent. A lot to unpack here. Well, thank you for your time and have a great day.

Thank you. Thank you Everyone.