What is Internet Performance Monitoring (IPM)? In this episode of the SMC Journal, you’ll learn about blind spots in current APM and Observability platforms, and why IPM is crucial for achieving true application resilience.
Our guest is Mehdi Daoudi, a recognized leader in the monitoring space with over sixteen years as CEO of Catchpoint with prior experience at DoubleClick. It’s a candid conversation about why Internet Performance Monitoring is essential for today’s Internet-facing applications without the buzzwords. You can tell Mehdi speaks based on experiential knowledge of monitoring over the years.
The Shift To Internet Performance Monitoring
Many companies have relied on Application Performance Monitoring (APM) tools to track application health, code-level issues, and infrastructure metrics. While APM continues to be used for monitoring as a tried and true solution by many, it falls short in today’s distributed, internet-driven environments. Modern applications increasingly rely on third-party services, APIs, DNS providers, and Content Delivery Networks (CDNs), all of which operate outside an organization’s direct control. There are blind spots introduced. This means there are still issues impacting user experience that come from somewhere not within the application itself. Many times it is out of the control of the organization tracking it. Many times they aren’t even aware of it until a support ticket is opened.
To find out more about Catchpoint, go to https://bit.ly/4jpULpV
Internet Performance Monitoring works alongside APM to address these gaps. Rather than focusing solely on what happens inside your infrastructure, IPM adds comprehensive visibility across the entire Internet Stack, including:
- DNS: Monitoring domain name resolution. This is the root-cause of many failures in the cloud.
- CDNs: Tracking the performance of distributed servers around the world that deliver content to users globally to the closest location to them to speed up trips across the network.
- APIs: Tracking internal and third-party API calls.
- Cloud Providers: Monitoring the quality of the cloud platform the applications are deployed to.
- ISPs: Visibility of the network paths and performance of Internet Service Providers.
- BGP (Border Gateway Protocol): Monitoring the routing protocol across the backbone of the internet. There have been many public failures with BGP in recent years.
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SaaS Applications: Uptime and performance metrics of the SaaS tools used by both internal employees and customers.
As Daoudi explained, Catchpoint’s philosophy is “centered around signal and data.” The company is committed to collecting the maximum number of signals from the internet to provide a complete, real-time view of how systems are performing from the end-user’s perspective. This means monitoring as many elements as possible, from as many global vantage points as possible, to truly represent the user experience. IPM can not only tell you when something is down, but if you can actually do anything about it.
Internet Performance Monitoring For Application Resilience
APM typically focuses on the application layer. This includes code traces and infrastructure metrics. IPM adds the “outside-in” approach to monitoring. This broader visibility helps organizations identify and resolve issues that traditional APM tools often miss, such as:
- ISP outages
- BGP routing errors
- Misconfigured or slow Content Delivery Networks (CDNs)
- Internal networks (LAN, SD-WAN)
- Security layers (VPN, SASE)
Although some APM solutions offer Digital Experience Monitoring (DEM) features, they rarely provide the specialized focus on “Internet health”. Actionable data helps teams minimize false positives and negatives. This means presenting all of the results from real user data, synthetic data, BGP data, and network data in a unified view. It’s all about how fast a monitoring solution can get you to the root-cause the fastest, with the least amount of clicks. APM working with IPM provides the best of both worlds.
Actionable Insights and Real-World Impact
Catchpoint’s approach to Internet Performance Monitoring is designed to be “data rich,” providing actionable intelligence that facilitates effective troubleshooting. By consolidating signals from across the Internet Stack, Catchpoint enables organizations to practice the “art of elimination,” quickly narrowing down the source of performance issues—whether they originate internally or somewhere along the complex web of internet infrastructure.
A big issue today is “tool sprawl”. According to a 2024 report from Grafana Labs, 70% of companies surveyed are using four or more monitoring tools. Other reports show the number of tools go from 10 to 30 when you add in security metrics. Daoudi addressed this concern. He emphasized that while Catchpoint often helps organizations consolidate legacy monitoring tools, the real cost lies in the “cost of inaction”, the expense of lengthy incident resolution, war rooms, and the loss of customer trust caused by poor internet performance. He advocated for centralization and standardization in monitoring tools to avoid the chaos of disparate, uncoordinated solutions. There needs to be a balance of both.
The Internet Performance Monitoring Platform
Daoudi outlined three essential criteria for any effective IPM platform:
- Monitor from where your users are: Deploy monitoring agents in the same locations and networks as the users to capture the most real-world experience.
- Monitor what matters across the entire Internet Stack: Don’t just focus on your own infrastructure. Monitor every layer that impacts the user experience.
- Provide actionable intelligence: You need a report that unifies the data and presents it in a way that leads to a rapid fix. You need root cause analysis and resolution as fast as possible.
He also confirmed that Catchpoint monitors hundreds of cloud services like AWS in real time, ensuring that cloud-dependent applications remain performant and resilient.
The Human Element
While advanced tools are critical, Daoudi underscored that people—and their drive for improvement—are paramount. He highlighted the evolving role of Site Reliability Engineers (SREs), noting that while many can handle day-to-day operations, those with deep, end-to-end understanding for complex troubleshooting are still rare and highly valuable.
IPM Is a Business Imperative
Internet Performance Monitoring is no longer optional. If you want to be successful in the digital world, you need it. By including additional metrics that Catchpoint calls the “Internet weather,” IPM can turn a company from reactive to proactive in finding and fixing issues. It means robust performance, improved resilience, and a seamless digital experience that today’s end users expect. Organizations that use IPM along with APM get the best visibility and ensure nothing slips through the cracks.
As Daoudi aptly stated, “The internet is the only element that nobody has good measurements on” without IPM. Make Internet Performance Monitoring a cornerstone of your IT operations strategy to stay ahead of disruptions and exceed user expectations in the digital age.
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