By Mehdi Daoudi For millions of people (154 million in 2016, in fact), Black Friday weekend is all about snagging great deals on gifts for the upcoming holidays. For a much smaller subset of that population, that weekend is more about making sure their website can handle the rapid influx of online tra... Sep. 25, 2017 02:11 PM EDT |
By Mehdi Daoudi  ‘Trend’ is a pretty common business term, but its definition tends to vary by industry. In performance monitoring, trend, or trend shift, is a key metric that is used to indicate change.
Change is inevitable. Today’s websites must frequently update and change to keep up with competiti... Sep. 24, 2017 01:00 PM EDT Reads: 1,023 |
By Mehdi Daoudi The ever-growing presence and complexity of third-party systems within IT architecture is arguably the biggest challenge that any DevOps or SRE professional faces on a daily basis. With so many components of IT infrastructure lying outside of your direct control, it’s an uphill battle ... Sep. 22, 2017 03:07 PM EDT |
By Mehdi Daoudi This is the third blog in a series in which we take a deeper look into O’Reilly’s DevOps for Media & Entertainment report. One of the competencies for DevOps teams as outlined in the report is the need for dynamic cloud infrastructure. Many business units within media a... Sep. 19, 2017 02:59 PM EDT |
By Mehdi Daoudi  According to this year’s Internet Trends Report, the cloud is steadily expanding and companies are spending more on these services. Businesses are opting to use these third-party services rather than build their own internal tool because they are often easier and less expensive to depl... Sep. 16, 2017 12:00 PM EDT Reads: 1,226 |
By Mehdi Daoudi Synthetic monitoring has been around in the tech industry for over two decades and its adoption rate has only been rising year after year. With that, the number of companies who claim to offer synthetic monitoring has also been steadily increasing. Prior to starting Catchpoint, our fou... Sep. 15, 2017 02:12 PM EDT |
By Mehdi Daoudi It’s hardly news that modern business is taking place primarily on the Internet. Regardless of its size, every business will lose some of its power if it doesn’t have an online presence. The Internet space is large enough to accommodate countless businesses and ventures, bu... Sep. 13, 2017 04:17 PM EDT |
By Mehdi Daoudi A web-based dashboard is similar in function to a vehicle dashboard in many ways. A vehicle dashboard typically features tools and symbols to will help the driver monitor multiple items at once like speed, fuel, engine functioning, etc. Not only do these meters and indicators help ensu... Sep. 7, 2017 02:06 PM EDT |
By Mehdi Daoudi  This is the second blog in a series of three in which I expand on some of the points raised in O’Reilly Media’s DevOps for Media & Entertainment report. The first post covered the two essential aspects of DevOps that are often overlooked: communication and empathy. Today, we dive into ... Sep. 6, 2017 07:30 PM EDT Reads: 1,492 |
By Mehdi Daoudi As the summer draws to a close and back-to-school sales wind down, retailers will soon be focusing their attention on the holiday shopping season. They’ll take special care to ensure that their ecommerce websites remain available and fast under heavy site traffic, protecting both brand... Aug. 31, 2017 01:30 PM EDT |
By Mehdi Daoudi  In Michael Lewis’s 2013 best-seller Flash Boys, in which he takes a deep dive into the world of high-speed trading, he reveals how certain financial insiders had managed to game the system by reducing latency as much as possible in order to get an advantage over their competitors. Lewi... Aug. 24, 2017 05:00 PM EDT Reads: 1,426 |
By Mehdi Daoudi In our first blog post of this series, we reviewed the omnichannel opportunity for retail banking and how it was driven by digital transformation. In this post, we’ll look at the specific opportunity around mobile banking. Security concerns aside, mobile banking is here to stay. Mobil... Aug. 24, 2017 12:21 PM EDT |
By Mehdi Daoudi Does your scroll bar get stuck when you scroll down to a webpage or do you see some delay while loading your images once you scroll down to the bottom of the screen? This erratic behavior that sometimes occurs while scrolling is referred to as ‘scrolling stickiness.’ Smooth... Aug. 23, 2017 03:41 PM EDT |
By Mehdi Daoudi A strategically curated website and an online presence can provide tremendous benefits only if consumers of your business can find your website faster and easier than your competitors’. A decade ago, the Nielsen Norman Group conducted an eye-tracking study to understand how the human e... Aug. 16, 2017 03:32 PM EDT |
By Mehdi Daoudi As consumers in today’s digital world, we often do vast amounts of research before making any sort of purchase. This applies to both personal and corporate purchases. According to Adweek, 81% of shoppers conduct online research before buying. The larger the purchase the higher the sta... Aug. 11, 2017 08:00 AM EDT |
By Mehdi Daoudi I’ve been thinking a lot lately about the term DevOps and what it really means. This train of thought is partially inspired by my recent participation in various DevOps Days events, as well as reading the DevOps for Media and Entertainment report published by O’Reilly. So, what is DevO... Aug. 10, 2017 10:13 AM EDT |
By Mehdi Daoudi In our previous post in this series, we suggested treating China as a second Internet. This concept implies the need to setup a separate monitoring strategy that is tailored to China, rather than just adding it on to your existing strategy. This post provides a step-by-step process to ... Aug. 8, 2017 09:23 AM EDT |
By Mehdi Daoudi This is the last blog in the series on sampling. In the previous editions (Part I, Part IIa, and Part IIb), we had (a) provided an overview of the metrics arms race and had walked through the use of sampling in this regard, (b) overviewed margin of error associated with…
The post... Aug. 3, 2017 11:08 AM EDT |
By Mehdi Daoudi Breaking into any new geographical market isn’t easy, but China presents a set of unique technical obstacles that makes this especially difficult. In a previous post, we provided an overview of the Chinese market and discussed the need for a different business strategy based on the Gol... Aug. 2, 2017 08:00 AM EDT |
By Mehdi Daoudi Chaos engineering as a practice is experimenting on a distributed system to expose gaps and weaknesses in your infrastructure that could cause a performance problem. As the tech industry expands and becomes more complex, chaos engineering is becoming an important part of a company’s di... Jul. 28, 2017 08:00 AM EDT |
By Mehdi Daoudi As the most populous nation on Earth, China represents tremendous business opportunities for companies with the ability to tap into its market. Of the country’s 1.4 billion people, 53.1% have access to the Internet and Cisco’s VNI report, forecasts this will grow to 66% by the year 202... Jul. 27, 2017 09:48 AM EDT |
By Mehdi Daoudi If you want a good example of how digital transformation has affected a long-established business model, look no further than retail banking. Bank customers today can perform most transactions online, via website or mobile app, without having to walk into a bank branch. This includes c... Jul. 24, 2017 11:44 AM EDT |
By Mehdi Daoudi  For over a decade, Application Programming Interface or APIs have been used to exchange data between multiple platforms. From social media to news and media sites, most websites depend on APIs to provide a dynamic and real-time digital experience. APIs have made its way into almost eve... Jul. 21, 2017 05:00 PM EDT Reads: 2,014 |
By Mehdi Daoudi Our goal at Catchpoint has always been to simplify things, make it more simple and scalable for our end users. In our constant endeavor to achieve scalability at lower costs, we introduced Webhooks. Webhooks are HTTP callbacks that are triggered by events specified in the code by the a... Jul. 21, 2017 08:25 AM EDT |
By Mehdi Daoudi The much hyped and anticipated Amazon Prime Day, held between July 10 and 11, was yet another example of Amazon’s impressive hold on the ecommerce industry. The company surpassed its Black Friday and Cyber Monday sales during the 30 hours marathon sale. The sales performance managed to... Jul. 14, 2017 11:44 AM EDT |
By Mehdi Daoudi In my first blog about my learnings from the Gartner ITOSS conference in Orlando, I shared my take on how cloud, the API economy, and IoT are driving significant changes in monitoring requirements. For infrastructure and operations (I&O), this means augmenting your tooling strategy... Jul. 12, 2017 08:15 AM EDT |
By Mehdi Daoudi In an earlier blog, the evolution of performance metrics – for example, from load time to above the fold to speed index – was discussed. As much as this evolution is warranted in the wake of the dynamic application landscape and changing user expectations, the phenomenon also contribut... Jul. 10, 2017 02:58 PM EDT |
By Mehdi Daoudi We discussed the MQTT protocol, how it works, and it’s growing role in the digital landscape in a previous blog post. To better understand the content in this article, read up on the basics of Machine to Machine (M2M) in the previous post. We will be using the Catchpoint MQTT monitor&#... Jul. 6, 2017 03:53 PM EDT |
By Mehdi Daoudi The complexity of services needed to deliver an online experience that meets customer’s expectations has grown tremendously over the years. Most of this is hidden to the customer; they only see the site they are viewing, not the ISPs, CDNs, APIs, or the IaaS providers that all have to ... Jun. 29, 2017 03:06 PM EDT |
By Mehdi Daoudi When it comes to the cloud, the network makes all the difference In our previous installment of this blog series, we covered the whole planning process for migrating your applications, infrastructure and services to the cloud while ensuring that you’re able to deliver the same consiste... Jun. 28, 2017 09:46 AM EDT |
By Mehdi Daoudi This year Velocity celebrated its 10th anniversary. A lot has changed in the past 10 years. Velocity has gone from a conference being held once a year to three yearly events, including international locations. Velocity was THE conference to attend to network and learn about web perform... Jun. 27, 2017 05:21 PM EDT |
By Mehdi Daoudi In the last blog, we discussed the different methods of compression and how it works. In this post, we are going to talk about the Brotli Compression in comparison to other compression algorithms. Brotli Compression Per rfc7932: Brotli is a lossless compressed data format that compress... Jun. 22, 2017 05:08 PM EDT |
By Mehdi Daoudi Webpage content is a mix of rich HTML, images, videos, and other media types. Multimedia content can add significantly to the overall page size and directly affect webpage performance. This doesn’t mean embedding videos are against best practices; all type of page content can be tuned ... Jun. 16, 2017 08:52 AM EDT |
By Mehdi Daoudi There’s no question that among the growing digital landscape, APIs play an indispensable role in allowing different tools, platforms, and devices to integrate with one another as seamlessly as possible. However, when devops and SRE teams are charged with monitoring the performance of m... Jun. 15, 2017 03:54 PM EDT Reads: 101 |
By Mehdi Daoudi Change is the only constant in life. There are many definitions of change, but for the purpose of this blog, I will define change as any deviation or variation between two or more instances. Just as we as humans experience changes in our mood on a regular basis, applications often chan... Jun. 7, 2017 12:53 PM EDT |
By Mehdi Daoudi In my last blog, we looked at how data is aggregated based on the trend of data. In this article, we discuss how this data is represented to users in a more meaningful way. The raw data for thousands of websites across different geographies that are measuring network components, page&#... Jun. 6, 2017 01:40 AM EDT Reads: 119 |
By Mehdi Daoudi This was my first time at Monitorama, which took place in Portland last week, and what an experience it was. I began my career in the monitoring space many years ago and after some time away, I have recently found myself back in the industry. Monitorama solidified precisely why I decid... May. 31, 2017 03:30 AM EDT |
By Mehdi Daoudi There are billions of smart devices in our world today, but what if these devices were interconnected? What if these devices can interact with each other just like how their owners do and form a kind of global nervous system? This essentially describes what people call the Internet of ... May. 30, 2017 02:52 PM EDT Reads: 183 |
By Mehdi Daoudi A/B testing (or split testing) is a method of comparing two or more versions of a webpage or app against each other to determine which one has better response or conversion rate. A/B tests allow you to test one version of images, colors, headings, forms etc… against one another. ... May. 24, 2017 11:14 AM EDT Reads: 107 |
By Mehdi Daoudi I’ve previously written about what it means to have a healthy network and the need for organizations to rethink their network monitoring strategy. There are two main reasons to monitor the network: to identify route health and to catch connectivity issues from a geographical perspectiv... May. 23, 2017 10:30 AM EDT |
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