Operations | Monitoring | ITSM | DevOps | Cloud

“Traceroute? You mean the thing I can type at the command line? Why would I even want to set up a test for that?” This is, believe it or not, a comment we hear a lot at Catchpoint. At least from folks who are either new to tech, new to monitoring, or new to Catchpoint (or all three). It’s a common misconception. It’s also something I’m not going to spend a ton of time addressing here. This blog is not meant to convince you why traceroute is super useful (even though it is).

June 12, 2025. A date most of the Internet won’t remember — but anyone relying on Google Cloud will. In the span of minutes, a routine quota update snowballed into global disruption. APIs stopped responding. Dashboards stayed green. And across continents, teams scrambled to figure out if the problem was theirs — or Google's. It wasn’t a cyberattack. It wasn’t a datacenter fire.

Today’s digital businesses are more interconnected than ever. Industry research shows that 74% of organizations now take an “API-first” approach, and the average application is powered by between 26 and 50 APIs. While this accelerates innovation, it also introduces new risks: when an external provider fails, the impact can be immediate and far-reaching.

Just when you’d finally wrapped your head around AI, here comes its autonomous cousin, Agentic AI. Think of it as AI that doesn’t just assist, but acts. It makes decisions, handles tasks, and communicates with other systems on its own. While it’s revolutionizing supply chains and customer experiences, there’s a catch. These autonomous agents rely on a plethora of third-party services, and when one fails, everything stops.

Border Gateway Protocol (BGP) remains the backbone of inter-domain routing on the Internet, but its fundamental trust model leaves it vulnerable to misconfigurations, hijacks, and blackholing. When these issues occur, they often go undetected by the impacted networks—until users report degraded performance or service outages. This post walks through a real-world incident in which a legitimate traffic spike led to an upstream provider mistakenly blackholing a critical IP address.

‘Without the internet, Digital Experiences do not exist,’ begins Increase Revenue and Improve Customer Experience with Internet Performance Monitoring, a study commissioned by Catchpoint to quantify the financial damage from internet outages. At first glance, that might seem painfully obvious—like pointing out that water is wet. But pause for a moment and consider: the digital experience today isn't just an aspect of business; it is the business. Suddenly, the stakes feel very different.

Can your AI tools really work together, or are they still stuck in silos? With Google’s new Agent-to-Agent (A2A) protocol, the days of isolated AI agents are numbered. This emerging standard lets specialized agents communicate, delegate, and collaborate—unlocking a new era of modular, scalable AI systems. Here’s how A2A could transform your workflows, and why making it observable is just as important as making it possible.

Catchpoint has officially crossed a major milestone: over 3,000 intelligent agents now power our Global Agent Network. This isn’t just a big number. It underscores our commitment to helping our users monitor what matters, from where it matters most: the end user. With agents deployed across 105 countries, 346 cities, and every layer of the Internet stack, Catchpoint now offers the broadest and deepest visibility into user experience available today.

In 2025, the average enterprise juggles over 150 SaaS applications, hybrid cloud infrastructures, and a workforce that expects seamless digital experiences—yet most CIOs still rely on monitoring strategies built for the data center era. The result? A $1.5 trillion annual hit to global GDP from downtime and performance lags, according to recent industry estimates. The problem isn’t the tools—it’s the thinking behind them.

Enterprises lose millions annually due to API outages and performance degradation. Modern observability strategies are crucial to mitigate these risks. Today, almost every system is dependent on APIs. Data integration, authentication, payment processing, and many other functions rely on multiple reliable and performant APIs. Banks around the world, for example, have adopted the Open Banking API for payments, credit scoring, lending origination, fraud detection, and lots more.