We at Catchpoint are always striving to help our customers improve their products’ user experience, because, as we believe that “the experience is the point.” With a motto like that, you can bet we take the usability and effectiveness of our own platform very seriously, and are constantly striving to deliver a world-class user experience in the Catchpoint Portal. With that in mind, we have spent the better part of the last few years redesigning Catchpoint Portal from the ground up.

Today marks the start of a new chapter at Catchpoint, as we launch our digital experience observability platform. In this post, I’ll share with you some of the wider contextual factors driving this launch, as well as how the continuous evolution of our platform supports a massive market need.

For some time now, people have understood the importance of early warning systems, whether for detecting earthquakes and tsunamis, military defense, or business and financial crises. Why should service providers, especially those delivering software as a service (SaaS,) be any different? In a world where time is money and minutes mean millions, it is vital for organizations to keep a very close eye on the supply and delivery chain of their service to their end users, both business and consumer.

2021’s slew of Internet outages or disruptions show how connected and relatively fragile the Internet ecosystem is. Case in point: December’s trifecta of Amazon Web Services (AWS) outages, which really brought home the fact that no service is too big to fail: The reality is, the next outage is not if, but when, where, and for how long. Pretending they don’t exist or won’t happen is not only pointless but harmful to your business.

If you did your holiday shopping online this year, you’re not alone. Cyber 5, the five days between Thanksgiving and Cyber Monday, represented one-fifth of all eCommerce sales for November and December in 2021 (despite a slight decline in overall spending since last year). Americans shelled out $8.9 billion on Black Friday deals and $10.7 billion on Cyber Monday specials.

What’s the first thing most people do when they’re unhappy with a business? Take to social media to complain about it. Observing those comments – otherwise known as “user sentiment observability” – gives you a head’s up as to when problems become big enough to impact user experience. How can you monitor that voice of the customer? And why is it important to do so? Let’s take a deeper look at the issues.

End user experience monitoring is a mindset and a philosophy. It’s the acknowledgement that IT is not the outcome, but rather a means to an end. Think of it this way: IT is here to support business operations. It does so by delivering technology to the tech-dependent workforce so employees can do their jobs seamlessly. Therefore, the most important thing to monitor in the IT ecosystem has shifted. It’s not the network, the device, or the cloud – these are only delivery mechanisms.

The following is an analysis of the Amazon Web Services (AWS) incident on 12/22/2021. When it comes to major AWS outages, three times is certainly not the charm. For the third time in three weeks, the public cloud giant reported an outage, this time due to a power outage “within a single data center within a single Availability Zone (USE1-AZ4) in the U.S.-EAST-1 Region," according to the AWS status page. Here at Catchpoint, we first observed issues at 07:11 a.m.

When it comes to work, we all know to put our best foot forward. However, as we increasingly rely on videoconferencing in our everyday work life, success also depends on being able to put our best face forward. Unfortunately, that can add up to a headache for IT when it comes to delivering flawless video experiences to a widely distributed workforce.