Monitoring company Catchpoint extended its footprint by adding new cloud nodes in six of the major cloud providers. It also added “fast-start monitoring” capability to increase its ability to monitor custom services or applications, outside of the protocols it already supports.

Catchpoint was founded in 2008, by four former DoubleClick (an ad serving subsidiary of Google) executives. The group left Google/DoubleClick to “get into the end user monitoring space because it was an industry that was a bit stagnant, in my opinion,” said Catchpoint CEO and co-founder Mehdi Daoudi. “The vision of Catchpoint was to build a service, SaaS [Software-as-a-Service] around two main pillars.”

These pillars have since come to define Catchpoint product lines. The first is synthetic — or proactive — monitoring, and the second is passive — or real user monitoring.

“When you think about synthetic monitoring, the best way to do it is to get as much signal as possible,” said Daoudi. One of the ways that Catchpoint does this is by distributing cloud nodes in the major regions of the six major cloud providers: Amazon Web Services (AWS), Microsoft Azure, Google Cloud Platform (GCP), IBM, and Tencent and Alibaba in China. It added more than 100 new nodes across these providers last week. Catchpoint also leverages its own internet backbone, broadband, and last mile monitoring capabilities.

As part of the synthetic monitoring, Catchpoint customers can deploy its software inside their firewall as either a virtual machine (VM), as a software, or as a device. It collects end user telemetry from the nodes to monitor the performance critical resources.

“Our job is to put these sensors in as many places as possible to help them cut through the layers of the onion and figure out where the problem is,” explained Daoudi.

The real user monitoring enables customers to collect raw data from their services, clients, applications, devices, networks, page elements, and more. It helps to identify problems and focus the solutions where they are required the most and improve service delivery. It is deployed using a JavaScript tag, via Catchpoint’s API with a custom client instrumentation code, or with a software development kit supplied by the monitoring company.

Previously, Catchpoint’s synthetic monitoring worked with 20 pre-packaged monitor types in your network. Now, with enterprise nodes it can help resolve the issues in the firewall. Organizations can deploy their own monitoring code and reuse scripts to monitor any type of application or service that Catchpoint couldn’t before.

“We wanted to bring customers the ability to monitor something that we don’t necessarily support out of the box,” said Daoudi. Catchpoint can now collect all of the contextual data to a particular service or device that the customer needs to monitor. Enterprise nodes are available as an agent-less software or as a portable device. The device can be installed in data centers, offices, or other customer locations.

Catchpoint uses all of its own backend systems, including its own ETL tool (which is used to extract, transform, and load database functions) and its own SQL database. This “gives us the flexibility that we have today and the power of analytics that we have,” said Daoudi.

It also built a command and control system for its nodes. The stateless nodes all talk to the distributed system on a separate infrastructure — either Catchpoint’s regular command and control system or an internally-deployed gateway.