Resilience is fragile. However much we consider enterprise technology deployments to be pillars of strength, there are always factors present that harbor the potential to dent system resilience and cause services to go offline. In the always-on world of connected cloud and web-based commerce, any given IT stack is fighting a plethora of factors from anomalies to misconfigurations to integration issues with the capability to impact and skew the resilience at the back end. At the front end, the user moves from uptime to downtime… and that means nobody is happy.
Because modern enterprise software often draws its lifeblood (i.e. data, application dependencies, analytics and so on) from a variety of sources, service disruption can come from many different locations and can manifest itself in many forms. While we talk about observability platforms for the cloud, there is a defined requirement to assess the web itself as an integral part of the application supply chain if we want to shore up our digital journeys.
Set sail on the web
That’s not a line from Internet resilience company Catchpoint, but it could be. The technology industry is fond of describing the web in nautical terms (remember surfing the web?) as if it were some physical place; a trend that may be behind why the company calls its latest product the Internet Stack Map. This capability is designed to automatically discover and track all the key components both internal and third party services or applications that a business uses.
Newly released year, Catchpoint explains how the Internet Stack Map uses the capabilities of its own Internet Performance Monitoring Platform to establish a real-time map with AI-enhanced alerting to showcase the status of an application or service. While we have traditionally and initially always defined application ‘dependencies’ as the external libraries, frameworks and connections to microservices etc. that an application needs to work, we now extend the term itself and talk about application Internet dependencies – as it sounds, this denotes the parts of the web and the cloud that an enterprise app requires to perform the functions it is designed for.
Catchpoint says that its Internet Stack Map provides an intuitive visualization of an organization’s services and application’s Internet dependencies so the IT operations (Ops) team can see how that service or application is performing. This eliminates (or at least reduces) the need to link disparate alerts or outages to a specific service and makes it easier for IT teams to understand what is impacting each service. It also identifies the systems and services impacting a given service or application and lets IT group them by type or purpose.
How do you sleep?
“There are two things that keep CIOs up at night: having systems that are up and running and the performance of those same systems. We estimate the reputational, productivity and revenue loss when these two core elements of digital operations aren’t working to be in the billions. This isn’t just an IT problem, it’s a business problem. The hybridization of IT infrastructure and the increasing reliance on cloud services and Internet connectivity are causing IT teams to struggle with identifying the best path forward,” said Mehdi Daoudi, CEO and co-founder of Catchpoint. “Internet Stack Map answers this call. The platform arms customers with the visibility and insights they need to proactively manage and resolve issues before they impact digital experiences.”
A recent SRE report from the company notes 64% of respondents think they should monitor application endpoints, even if they are out of their control, highlighting the need for software development (Dev) engineers and operations teams to have visibility into their entire Internet stack in one place. With three-quarters of engineers driving post-incident work, catching issues before they become incidents could be argued to free up a significant amount of time to focus on more productive IT work.
Talking about how he started the company from humble beginnings, CEO Daoudi has explained how he used to perform Internet monitoring functions on the services he worked with from home. This was a time when some of the more rudimentary tools known across the web of the 1990s were the only options available – and many of those brand names no longer exist today.
Trust in trust, trust me
“My epiphany moment in the technology business was when I really started to understand the importance of ‘trust’, really. But why am I, some tech company leader talking about insisting on trust? It’s because businesspeople at all levels (and consumers for that matter) always buy on the basis of trust – and think that’s what our Catchpoint team does 24×7 i.e. we elevate and reinforce trust for enterprises in their Internet stack, which is now a business fundamental for revenue growth and wider prosperity,” said Daoudi.
With a core product and service offering established on what Daoudi calls out as key guiding principle, the four cornerstones of establishing an Internet resilience platform are as follows:
- Reachability – can a user get to the Internet services that they need?
- Reliability – can a user get to that service every time, with consistency?
- Performance – is an Internet service fast or slow?
- Availability – is an Internet service truly functional the way that it should be?
“When we think about automation and AI and how it will underpin the kind of services we provide to underpin Internet resilience, I think we’re on the brink of really changing the way we serve users as operators,” said Daoudi. “I can’t wait to get to the point where I wake up in the morning, get a cup of coffee and just look at a report to see all the things that the machines have looked after, managed, rectified and addressed overnight.”
According to Shamus McGillicuddy, Enterprise Management Associates vice president of research, network infrastructure and operations, Catchpoint today offers Internet Performance Monitoring (IPM) with ease of use, depth of real-time knowledge and rapid deployment. McGillicuddy has stated that as we stand today, legacy APM tools are only instrumented for applications within an organization’s four walls, so an IPM solution is needed to expand observability to where it matters most – where an organisation’s workforce and customers are.
Outside the four walls
The technology on offer in Catchpoint’s Internet Stack Map shows a customized view of both internal and external sources to pinpoint and fix issues. The technology itself offers a live operational dashboard to show the severity of resilience issues in real-time. Using a technology that the company calls its Internet Sonar (more nautical references there perhaps), this service monitors the Internet’s third-party services, the Cloud Services Providers (CSPs) that use the web as their conduit and delivery channel, the Internet Services Providers (ISPs) that drive the web itself and the Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) providers who send apps out across the cloud. By analyzing all these services, Cloudpoint suggests that it can identify IT issues with better visibility and avoid having to set up expensive ‘war rooms’ to mitigate problems.
When an enterprise application or service is not performing as expected, IT Ops teams need to troubleshoot to determine exactly why. This may involve viewing multiple dashboards, correlating multiple alerts or trying to link seemingly unrelated outages to that service. Catchpoint aims to provide an altogether more unified and holistic approach to this practice and help make Internet Performance Monitoring (IPM) more resilience more resilient.
Troubleshooting at this level with enterprise software typically involves examining the status of all systems and services that could be impacting the performance of an application or service. This very often requires searching for specific tests, dashboards or observability data and trying to ascertain how they are related to the performance of the service being analyzed. A fairly difficult and time-consuming exercise, IT teams battling system disruption will generally be facing outage costs that rack up to several thousand dollars per minute. The Catchpoint Internet Stack Map is interactive and each element is clickable, allowing a detailed drill-down to the specific error impacting that element. The company promises that this makes troubleshooting faster and simpler, while also accelerating Mean Time To Recovery (MTTR).
Catchpoint CEO Daoudi’s most telling point was his description of the ‘hybridization of IT infrastructure’ today; with such a complex web (pun not intended) of services, data fabrics and application entities all so massively interwoven, the need to map out what parts are working when, where and why is always in need.
Happier SRE teams?
An established industry term, but not one commonly used around the boardroom table by non-technical management or employees, Site Reliability Engineering (SRE) alongside the sister discipline of DevOps has become an increasingly debated issue in the modern cloud computing era.
Users at the front end will probably never question why uptime outages might occur down to this level, but, in an era when more people want to know the size of the known universe and gain a passing ‘dinner party level’ knowledge of quantum computing, we reasonably hope people to question who is connecting all the pipes (or not) in the guts of the Internet that we all rely on.
Catchpoint co-founders (from left): Dritan Suljoti, chief product & technology officer, Mehdi Daoudi … [+]
