Catchpoint vs. SolarWinds Pingdom

Proactive Website and API performance testing, Synthetic monitoring, and third-party integration are where Catchpoint is best suited. Catchpoint is less appropriate in Deep Application Performance monitoring, debugging complex user journeys in real-time, Small businesses, and Mobile app performance monitoring. These are the scenarios where I find Catchpoint is well-suited and scenarios where it is less appropriate.

Incentivized

Pingdom is well suited to monitor any of your public facing IPs, so you receive an alert by text message or email when the IP you are monitoring does not respond for a given length of time, from an impressive 10ms to 30s. This allows you to be pretty granular with the alerting. It's less appropriate for monitoring IPs on your LAN, unless you NAT these through your firewall.

Incentivized

• Catchpoint Synthetics: We create our synthetic monitoring using catchpoint. Creating the synthetics monitors are easy and requires basic knowledge on selenium and javascript. It allows you to run the test from external(backbone) and internal enterprise nodes. The screenshot and filmstrip feature is an add-on along with various customisations. Once created, It provides a detailed insight of each request that is involved in the application flow which helps us in addressing the issue at the request level.
• Catchpoint API Test: This is another kind of test which we have explored in our organisation. This has helped us to maintain the health check of our APIs and also we have utilised it for a variety of our use cases.
• Catchpoint Dashboard: This is our one-stop shop for all our monitors. It has multiple widgets that displays various application performance metrics. We use this feature immensely and it is of great value to the business.
• Catchpoint UI: It is very user friendly and with basic introduction anyone can just get started with it.

Incentivized

• Alerting, particularly the integration with PagerDuty.
• Reporting: the ability to go back and view the history of each status check (including details about every failure) as well as graphs and reports over a longer time period.
• Weekly uptime report emails are very convenient.
• Programmatic configuration is possible with a third-party Terraform plugin.

Incentivized

• The ability to monitor the Catchpoint nodes with the ability to setup a take a recovery action based on specific criteria
• The ability to tell us when we are at X% capacity so that we better plan or budget for increasing the "capacity" of the Catchpoint nodes before we get to an overloaded state. The capacity utilization graph is not a reliable indicator for this metric. How can the capacity utilization rate get above 100%, it does not make sense

Incentivized

• sometimes sends false alerts
• there should be some threshold value for when an application is not reachable, it should alert after 30 seconds and keep sending hello packets for those 30 seconds and if still there is no response, then it should send the alert.
• too many unwanted metrics.

Incentivized

we are heavily dependent catchpoint system for the following functions * Detect end-user availability/performance-related problems * Ensures
service level objectives (SLO) are met, that prevents service level
agreement (SLA) breaches * Identify and understand the cause of any
network connectivity or application level issue * Improves the
availability and response time service levels

Incentivized

Recently added features have made Pingdom less intuitive for our requirements. While Pingdom has a broad offering and remains a good value, it is becoming more than we need. Our customer base is becoming more and more global and Pingdom still lacks Asia-Pacific monitoring, which we will need within a year.

It's hard to find the functionalities that I am looking for in the application. Even if I did something in the past, after a time I have to re-learn again where the functionalities are. This is a powerful tool, but not user-friendly. Texts in the buttons and menus are not always meaningful or easily comprehensible.

Incentivized

Pingdom is easy to use, very intuitive and has a very short learning curve. From the onset, we've been able to jump in and leverage the tool to accomplish our goals for page speed performance and discover the insights we need to make improvements. Its a well-designed tool and makes for a good user experience.

Incentivized

Interface is unnecessarily complicated and frequently responds slowly.

The customer support is fantastic as they keep you updated and follow up even though we may not even follow up. Make sure they send a communication so that we remain updated. They value engineers who will get on a call with you to understand any requirement we have on any test, and they bring in the best developers on call.

Incentivized

Customer service from Solarwinds has always been stellar. We've never gone unnoticed, even though we're currently within their tail segment. They're a great partner to us and indeed an important one. When we've had to submit a ticket, we've always received a response within 24 hours. I'd highly recommend SolarWinds to any organization with a server network

Incentivized

very easy to implement as the product is user-friendly

Incentivized

Datadog is good, but more expensive. New Relic is good but does not provide the same features as Catchpoint does. Checkly is good, but Catchpoint offers different frameworks to create synthetic tests, which is preferable to my engineering team.

Incentivized

We have only used Pingdom for these needs, so I can't speak directly to competitors. That being said, for the reasons we used Pingdom it was fantastic value and the fact we never bothered to look for a competitor speaks volumes about our satisfaction with the product.

Incentivized

• Catchpoint points based licensing for public hosted nodes is complicated and unpredictable in points required.
• Catchpoint lacks AI powered anomaly detection and automated remediation. This gap means more manual triage and slower MTTR during incidents.
• The advanced 360 degree blackbox monitoring is enabling us to monitor the APIs, UI and proactively gain insights into the application behavior and performance before customer is impacted.

Incentivized

• Our client has continued to use our services
• It has helped our organisation keep up to date about any site traffic fluctuations and help us make educated decisions on appropriate server resources for the site
• The service is relatively inexpensive making it easy to cost into our maintenance charges

Incentivized