On June 8, 2021, many of us were left staring at blank screens or “Service Unavailable” errors when trying to access the internet. The panic was shared by millions of people around the world. Everything from Spotify, Amazon, and Reddit to Vimeo, Twitch, and Pinterest was inaccessible to users. This major outage that impacted any service using Fastly. Here is a quick rundown of what happened and why.
At Catchpoint, our mission is to provide customers with actionable data that will help them reduce MTTR and maintain a positive digital experience. We measure "from where the users are" to ensure the data reflects real end-user experience. As someone that's part of the Catchpoint on-call chain, this is extremely important to me. I do not want to be woken up at 2 AM because a server is misbehaving, only to find out that the application failed over gracefully and no users were impacted.
At Catchpoint, our award-winning support team aims to be a partner, not just a gateway to the tool. Earlier this month when UltraDNS, a major DNS provider, went down, they found themselves faced with nine support tickets within one hour. Our customers were experiencing outages on their websites and online services. They needed urgent help from Catchpoint in understanding what was causing the disruption, so they could quickly resolve the situation.
Monitoring methodologies evaluate application reachability, availability, performance, and reliability to measure digital experience accurately. Only measuring one or the other will offer a skewed view of the end-user experience. For example, higher availability is not the sole indicator of a good end-user experience. At the same time, reliability is a critical performance indicator for service providers.
At Catchpoint, I work as a Solutions Engineer. Being on the sales side, one of the applications I use a lot is Salesforce, the CRM platform used at Catchpoint and thousands of other organizations. You don’t have to take my word for it. Here is Catchpoint’s endpoint monitoring data showing I speak the truth!
When the world transitioned to a remote workspace, one of the things that most of us figured out quickly was that some applications just don’t work well with corporate VPN. Video and voice applications, like Microsoft Teams, are essential to business operations. I wouldn’t want to add another point of failure that I’d need to troubleshoot if I didn’t have to.
We are in this together. As part of our continuous efforts to meet customer expectations, we have recently added Core Web Vitals to our performance measurement programs. We are happy to share that these metrics are now a native part of the Catchpoint Platform. DevOps’ SREs, Platform Operations Engineers, and business and monitoring strategists alike will realize a series of key benefits from this addition.
The Domain Name System (DNS) is at the core of the engine that keeps the internet running. We have explained how DNS works and why it is critical to the functioning of the internet in our Synthetic Monitoring Guide. The DNS resolution relies on various components, such as the DNS resolvers, name servers, authoritative servers, and zone files, to function properly and the process typically takes milliseconds to complete.
