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Discover how Catchpoint helps end-user experience monitoring

The Catchpoint end-user experience monitoring tool supports several notable integrations with enterprise software and monitoring capabilities such as real user monitoring.

End-user experience monitoring can encapsulate several factors such as how well the device and the network are performing, whether applications are crashing and whether the users can reach critical SaaS applications they need.

Catchpoint is a tool that allows IT to monitor networking, application performance and other factors from the end users' perspective. With Catchpoint's synthetic monitoring and real user monitoring (RUM), IT can get invaluable insight into user experience as it pertains to SaaS applications such as Office 365.

Organizations need to factor UX into their desktops, applications and back end systems to ensure they can attract and retain talent. As UX becomes a larger focus for enterprise IT, perhaps the best method they can use is user experience monitoring tools. Desktop monitoring is critical, but IT needs to go beyond the desktops alone to monitor the tools and software users interact with throughout the day.

SaaS apps such as the Office 365 suite can make up 80% or more of a user's workflow, so IT pros need statistical insight that shows how reliable SaaS application delivery is. Whoever negotiates and decides on SaaS contracts and licensing agreements can take poor performance data and bring it back to the SaaS vendor as proof of issues or they can rest assured that the organization provides a good UX based on positive data.

IT professionals should understand the features that Catchpoint can offer and why these processes are important for end-user experience monitoring.

Synthetic monitoring

With synthetic monitoring, IT pros can deploy VMs all over the world to monitor internal and external application performance. IT must set up dummy end users that programmatically perform functional tests to see how applications are working.

Perhaps even more impressive is that Catchpoint takes anonymous data from other customers into account.

If an IT pro wants to simulate end users logging into Microsoft Outlook, the synthetic monitoring feature of Catchpoint can script a dummy user logging into Outlook to see how the app is performing and if the app is online at all. These probes can run at locations that employees are working from so admins can go beyond performance metrics and employee feedback.

Additionally, Catchpoint takes anonymous data from other customers into account. This way, Catchpoint provides IT with end-user experience monitoring insight beyond its own systems. With this approach, admins can see if the issue users are experiencing are only local or if there is a major SaaS outage for certain apps.

Real user monitoring

The most direct way to get a picture of UX across an organization is to track real users' activity from their perspective. This is where RUM comes into play.

For instance, with Catchpoint's RUM IT pros can use an outage analyzer, which can show possible outages by presenting metrics such as expected page views versus actual page views. If the difference between these numbers is large enough, there may be an outage. IT can set up alerts to send notifications based on conditions such as network response time for a specific application being too slow.

Catchpoint end-user experience monitoring integrations

When IT combines Catchpoint with end-user performance tools such as Nexthink, it can integrate these other tools with the existing performance monitoring stack. Nexthink, for example, provides insight into desktops' local CPU and memory use. This complements Catchpoint well, which offers greater detail regarding the performance of the users' cloud applications.

With any enterprise software, it's important for IT to consider out-of-the-box integrations with other systems that can exchange data. Catchpoint has numerous integrations with enterprise-grade software. Some of the notable integrations include:

  • PagerDuty
  • ServiceNow
  • Moogsoft
  • Splunk
  • Lucene's Elasticsearch
  • Slack
  • Microsoft Teams
  • Ansible
  • Chef
  • HashiCorp'sTerraform

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