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What better way to start 2012 than with a big product release! Our engineering team completed over 100 user stories. Here are three key features that were released and are a first in a synthetic monitoring solution:

New Monitor Type: Playback

We are introducing a new monitor type called Playback. Playback provides the ability to monitor HTTP transactions captured by a browser. Unlike an emulator that tries to parse and execute the HTML, it relies on actual browser HTTP data.

Catchpoint platform runs the test on a specific interval in a real browser (IE or Chrome) to capture the HTTP data and it then monitors it on a more frequent interval. The monitor follows the same HTTP limits as a browser and honors JavaScript blocking.

In addition, Playback has the ability to monitor HTTP data recorded in a HAR file by other tools like Chrome Developer Tools or HTTPWatch.

Tracepoint Charting:

The Tracepoint feature allows Catchpoint customers to quickly identify what servers, pops, vips, application versions are causing problems. The feature was mainly for troubleshooting and was limited to waterfall charts.

With this release, users have the ability to chart trending data by Tracepoint to better understand how the performance varies across their environment.

Beyond Averages for Alerts:

Almost every monitoring tool in the market relies on Averages for alerts. However, we all know too well that averages hide the truth – and this impact is even higher for synthetic monitoring tools.  We have supported charting on Median and other statistical values from the day we launched Catchpoint, and now we have the ability to set trailing alert based on any of these statistical values Catchpoint supports: Median/Geo Mean/St Dev/ Geo St Dev.75/85/95/99%. You do not have to figure out your baseline and thresholds, the system does it for you.

The Catchpoint Team.