Third-party monitoring

Today most cloud providers offer a variety of monitoring solutions. In addition, a number of companies such as Datadog offer monitoring-as-a-service. In this section, we are not covering monitoring-as-a-service in depth.

In recent years, more and more people have access to the internet. Many services are offered online to cater to the increasing user base. As a result, web pages are becoming larger, with increased client-side scripts. Users want these services to be fast and error-free. From the service point of view, when the response body is composed, an HTTP 200 OK response is sent, and everything looks okay. But there might be errors during transmission or on the client side. As previously mentioned, monitoring services from within the service infrastructure give good visibility into service health, but this is not enough. You need to monitor user experience, specifically the availability of services for clients. A number of third-party services such as Catchpoint, Pingdom, and so on are available for achieving this goal.

Third-party monitoring services can generate synthetic traffic simulating user requests from various parts of the world, to ensure the service is globally accessible. Other third-party monitoring solutions for real user monitoring (RUM) provide performance statistics such as service uptime and response time, from different geographical locations. This allows you to monitor the user experience from these locations, which might have different internet backbones, different operating systems, and different browsers and browser versions. Catchpoint Global Monitoring Network is a comprehensive 3-minute video that explains the importance of monitoring the client experience.