Why Internet Performance Monitoring is the new frontier in a distributed world

The landscape of applications and their delivery has undergone a dramatic transformation. Applications are no longer standalone entities but are now intricate collections of services, APIs, and distributed applications across various cloud environments. 

This ecosystem relies heavily on core internet services such as DNS and BGP, while networks have evolved to embrace a variety of complex architectures, including IPv4/6, WAN, SD-WAN, SASE, EDGE, and 5G technologies. Moreover, with users spread across the globe, understanding regional performance variations has become crucial to ensuring experiences for your customers and employees.

Given this backdrop, it’s unsurprising that traditional Application Performance Monitoring (APM) and Network Performance Monitoring (NPM) tools are struggling to keep pace. In its original form, APM was conceived over 30 years ago for a much simpler time. Back then, applications were predominantly monolithic, three-tier structures, most infrastructure was housed on-premises, and the concept of virtualization—or the elastic metrics that come with today’s cloud and Kubernetes environments—was nonexistent. 

With the cloud becoming the new data center and SaaS the new application stack, ensuring the availability and reachability of applications now requires monitoring, managing, and troubleshooting the new enterprise network: the internet. 

Introducing Internet Performance Monitoring

Internet Performance Monitoring (IPM) is a new generation of solutions that provide deep visibility into every aspect of the internet that impacts a business. It monitors all the layers of the new internet stack – all the components that work together to deliver seamless digital services from organizations to end-users, from the application layer down to the network foundation, including core elements like BGP, DNS, CDNs, SASE, and MQTT. 

According to a Forrester Consulting study commissioned by Catchpoint, “investing in IPM tools offers significant ROI” for any organization that requires a resilient Internet to operate – which, let’s face it, is pretty much everyone out there.

How IPM differs from APM 

While APM tools concentrate on application code, identifying issues like database wait times, inefficient code, and resource bottlenecks, IPM focuses on the experience, aiming to enhance the customer and workforce experience by monitoring how applications or APIs perform over the internet. Although both APM and IPM leverage synthetics, Real User Monitoring (RUM), and performance profiling, IPM employs these tools differently. 

APM primarily uses synthetic agents in the cloud for cloud-to-cloud monitoring, effective for application optimization but inadequate for assessing real user experiences. IPM adopts a different strategy, focusing on how customers and employees interact with systems, not from the cloud, but from diverse environments—be it via a laptop in the suburbs, a mobile device while traveling, or a tablet in a coffee shop.

Why Catchpoint

Catchpoint’s IPM platform offers five comprehensive solutions designed to provide complete operational insight into every facet of the business: Customer, Workforce, Network, Application, and Website Experience. With its independence from hyperscalers, SaaS platforms, and other cloud-based resources, Catchpoint stands out by offering unparalleled outside-in visibility into the entire internet stack, ensuring a holistic view of performance across the digital ecosystem.

Learn more about how to ensure the resilience of your Internet Stack with IPM