Network Visibility For Application Performance
Tags: kubernetes, devops, programming, cloud
Published: 2024-05-30 15:37:43

Everything an engineer does starts at the network and reaches an application. Whether that application is on your phone, iPad, laptop, or server, it all starts by reaching out to a network. Because of this, the network you’re on or the network you’re trying to reach is the most crucial component of any engineering implementation or use case.

In this blog post, you’ll learn about network observability, application observability, and a tool that can help you achieve the ability to see outcomes and troubleshoot the entire network and application stack.

## Network Observability

Just about every device is touching the internet. Whether it’s your phone, iPad, smartwatch, laptop, Kindle, or whatever else, it has an IP address. Sometimes, that IP address is a private IP, and other times it’s a public IP. Sometimes the IP address only allows you to be on your local network (LAN) and sometimes it will enable you to reach out to the public internet (WAN).

The Point is that every single device we use today is IP-based.

Because of that, it only makes sense to ensure that whatever device you’re using is getting the best performance it possibly can (who wants to wait around for 5 seconds for a website to load?).

To understand how the devices will perform, how websites will perform, and how long it’ll take you to reach your destination, you need to see how the network from both an internal and external perspective.

That’s what network observability helps you do.

## Application Observability

Much like network observability, applications need a way to ensure it’s as performant as possible. Whether you’re looking at end-to-end application health with tracing, viewing any logs that may throw warnings/errors, or the server/container running your application, you need to ensure that your application is performing as expected or better than expected.

Application Performance Management (APM) helps engineers ensure that:

- The application meets critical expectations for performance.
- Expectations are established and more importantly, met.
- Availability has as many 9’s as possible.

## Enter Internet Performance Monitoring (IPM) With Catchpoint

IPM takes observability to the next level. Instead of just monitoring and observing the application workloads from an APM perspective and the cluster/infrastructure from a network bandwidth and CPU/memory perspective, IPM allows you to see what is impacting your environment from a network and application perspective from public-facing workloads.

This is an interesting way of troubleshooting because there are a fair amount of instances where public-facing issues may impact your environment. The whole “it’s not DNS… it’s DNS” thing actually exists.

Catchpoint is driving the innovation and overall idea behind IPM and they’re implementing not only it but focusing on network reliability and application performance as well.

IPM measurement consists of:

- Bandwidth
- Latency
- Jitter
- Packet Loss
- Throughput
- Error Rate
- Uptime
- Downtime
- MTTR

The idea behind IPM is it’s all about what’s impacting your environment externally. For example, APM is about what’s going on with your application and environment internally and IPM is about what’s impacting your application from an external perspective.

## A Bit About Catchpoint

The team at Catchpoint has a background in network observability since the 90’s. Combining the expertise from the early days of the internet to how we see the internet today, which runs the world, it’s always a great idea to get some advice (or software) from the people who have been there since the beginning.

Catchpoint combines APM and IPM to ensure that not only is the application performing as expected, but any external forces aren’t impacting your environment.