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At Cloud Field Day, I sat in on a presentation from Catchpoint, a company focused on digital experience monitoring. Their platform delivers real-time insights into the performance and availability of applications, services, and networks. What sets Catchpoint apart is how they’re reframing observability—moving away from infrastructure-centric monitoring and placing the focus squarely on end-user experience.

It started with a three-hour outage

Catchpoint’s origin story starts with co-founder and CEO Mehdi Daoudi, who previously led a team at DoubleClick (later acquired by Google) responsible for delivering 40 billion ad impressions per day. After accidentally triggering a three-hour outage, he became deeply committed to performance monitoring. “If I had to run the same team I ran back then, I would focus on the end user first,” he said. “Because that’s what matters.”

Users Don’t Live in your Data Center

“Traditional monitoring starts from the infrastructure up,” explained Mehdi explained: “but users don’t live in your data center.” Catchpoint flips the model by simulating real user activity from the edge, surfacing issues like latency, outages, or degraded performance before they affect customers—or make headlines.

no CIO wakes up hoping for “50% availability.

Mehdi illustrated the point with a story: walking into a customer network operations center where every internal system showed green lights—yet no ads were being delivered. The problem? Monitoring was focused inside the data center, not from the perspective of users on the outside. That gap in visibility led to costly blind spots.

In today’s distributed, cloud-first world—where user experience depends on a web of DNS providers, CDNs, edge nodes, and cloud services—that lesson is even more relevant. The internet may be a black box, but users expect it to work seamlessly, and they’ll publicly let you know when it doesn’t.

Catching the unknown unknowns

By reducing both mean-time-to-detect (MTTD) and mean-time-to-repair (MTTR), Catchpoint helps teams catch “unknown unknowns”—the unexpected failures APM tools often miss until it’s too late. It’s not just about knowing what went wrong, but knowing before your customers notice.

In a fragile, high-stakes digital environment, monitoring isn’t just an IT concern anymore—it’s a business-critical capability. As Mehdi put it, no CIO wakes up hoping for “50% availability.” Reliability is not a nice-to-have.

Pau for now…