Catchpoint helps Google Cloud customers improve Internet resilience
The web is online.
It’s such a basic truism that sometimes we don’t question this core technology proposition. Yes, the web is (generally speaking, even when flaky service results) mostly always online… except sometimes it’s not.
For a litany of reasons, the web is also prone to dropouts and service disruptions that can lead to application degradation, damaging data drop-outs, potential cloud computing service misconfiguration and a whole host of other negatives that cause sleepless nights for the Site Reliability Engineers (SREs) we now depend upon for our always-on existence.
Aiming to combat these issues is Catchpoint, a firm that self-styles itself as The Internet Resilience Company™ in capitals, with an emblazoned trademark symbol to boot.
This year has seen Catchpoint release “Test Suite for Google Cloud,” a tool designed to ease the end-to-end monitoring of Google Cloud services from different customer-chosen endpoints including customer premises, other public clouds and Internet endpoints.
This suite is specifically developed to streamline the configuration and management of cloud service tests, thereby providing what the firm promises are immediate benefits in operational performance and user experience.
Internet Performance Monitoring (IPM)
The Test Suite is part of Catchpoint’s Internet Performance Monitoring (IPM) platform, a set of enterprise software services designed to provide visibility into aspects of the Internet that can impact a business.
In the total species and genus classification of technologies that we might label under ‘observability; this is like Application Performance Management (APM), but not for an organisation’s application stack – it’s for the organisation’s Internet Stack.
The Test Suite for Google Cloud is designed to allow IT teams to deploy multiple tests for Google Cloud services, utilising Google Cloud’s and Catchpoint’s best practices for prompt issue detection and troubleshooting. Its design focuses on minimising complexity and time investment for effective Google Cloud service monitoring.
“Our collaboration with Google Cloud is fundamentally about simplifying and enhancing the network performance monitoring experience for businesses leveraging Google Cloud services. The Test Suite for Google Cloud is a direct response to this need, facilitating more efficient implementation and streamlining the monitoring process for Google Cloud services,” said Mehdi Daoudi, CEO and co-founder of Catchpoint. “In an era where cloud computing is crucial for business efficiency, ensuring optimal performance, resilience and user experience through sophisticated and precise monitoring is paramount. Our ongoing partnership with Google Cloud promises to yield further innovative solutions in this domain.”
This initiative is a part of Catchpoint’s integration into the Google Cloud network observability partner ecosystem.
Director of product management for network experiences at Google Cloud Raj Gulani says that a robust Google Cloud network observability partner ecosystem not only provides choice but also a company to use current observability solutions, workflows and skills to effectively monitor Google Cloud workloads, tailored to specific needs, including hybrid and multi-cloud deployments.
The Test Suite includes pre-set test templates for key Google Cloud services such as BigQuery, Spanner, Cloud Storage and Compute Engine. These templates are customisable, allowing users to adapt tests to their specific requirements, which is said to be beneficial for businesses needing swift deployment and monitoring of their cloud services.
Humility among floorsweepers
With the popularisation of so-called full stack methodologies and approaches so prevalent in the cloud era, the notion of the Internet stack needs little justification i.e. this is now a defined zone where organisations are placing a significant amount of their compute, analytics (and now AI) and related data repository-based enterprise IT services. Catchpoint appears to have placed itself squarely in a key zone for the new neo-observability practices we need for a connected world. As CEO Daoudi puts it, “Catchpointers [the internal name for employees] embody a spirit of grit and persistence, [which is] just as important as humility and a floorsweeper approach.”
You had us at always-on floorsweepers, sir.
