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Catchpoint bolsters IT Ops with ‘advanced’ XLO tracking 

Adrian Bridgwater
Adrian Bridgwater

With the recent CrowdStrike global IT outage incident ringing in our ears, it is perhaps no surprise to hear  Internet Performance Monitoring (IPM) company Catchpoint reinforcing its product line and explaining how its platform is currently evolving.

Catchpoint has now announced enhancements to its suite of Service Level Objective (SLO) capabilities, focusing on Experience Level Objectives (XLOs) monitoring. 

Unlike traditional SLOs that primarily measure system availability, the newly introduced XLOs prioritise metrics that gauge user experience and satisfaction. This approach aims to provide IT operations teams with a more nuanced understanding of performance by aligning technical metrics with user-centric outcomes.  

While availability is crucial, Catchpoint’s favourite tagline is: slow is the new down.

Catchpoint’s new capabilities are designed to help businesses evolve their SLO monitoring from internal to end-user-centric metrics, especially during high-traffic periods.

Experience Level Objectives (XLOs)

According to magical analyst house Gartner’s Hype Cycle for Site Reliability Engineering, 2024, “Customers’ and consumers’ expectations of IT services have evolved, driving enterprise software to consider user experience as a key component of application success.”

Catchpoint’s new XLO monitoring capabilities are said to align with this directive, providing mature organisations with the tools needed for resilience and excellence in user experience. 

Based on this insight and customer feedback, Catchpoint has developed XLO monitoring to measure the following performance metrics:   

  • Wait Time: The duration between the user’s request and the server’s initial response

  • Response Time: The total time taken for the server to process a request and send back the complete response  

    First Contentful Paint (FCP): The time it takes for the browser to render the first piece of content on the screen 

  • Largest Contentful Paint (LCP): Time when the largest content is visible within the browser 
  • Cumulative Layout Shift (CLS): A measure of how much the layout of the page shifts unexpectedly during loading  
  • Time to Interactive: The time it takes for a page to become fully interactive and responsive to user inputs 

As  Gartner’s hype cycle for SRE notes, mature SRE teams must ensure service quality by tracking end-to-end SLOs that represent the entire product user journey.

Through the Catchpoint portal, companies can set specific performance objectives, such as ensuring the Largest Contentful Paint (LCP) does not exceed 2.5 seconds 90% of the time in a given month, which is imperative for maintaining a smooth user experience and reducing bounce rates. Catchpoint’s platform tracks these objectives, showing weekly, monthly and quarterly results. A burndown chart is also available to help predict when a firm might exceed an  XLO. This allows businesses to make decisions about their website’s development and performance.  

By tracking changes over time, businesses can decide whether to release changes to their website based on their impact on Core Web Vitals. This proactive approach helps maintain high user satisfaction and ensures that performance objectives are met consistently.