Public Status Health Dashboard 4.0 released
Over the weekend we had a major release of our Public Status Pages. I’m very exited about the improvements both on the back-end and in functionality for our customers.
In this article I’d like to walk you through the improvements and invite you to share your suggestions for the next release.
The WatchMouse Public Status Pages
For those of you not familiar with our Public Status Pages yet, I included a short summary on the what, why, and who.
What is a Public Status Page?
A WatchMouse Public Status Page enables your organisation to display information about the availability and performance of your critical services. You can post announcements, annotate current issues, and optionally set up a special host name (CNAME) so people can access the status page on your domain, e.g. status.yourdomain.com. It is an easy control channel through which you can transparently inform visitors about the status of your sites and web services.
All WatchMouse Public Status Pages are hosted on Amazon’s Cloud infrastructure so they are available even if your site or service is not. Read more here.
Why Public Status Pages are important.
The single most important reason to have a Public Status Page or Health Dashboard is to have communication channels in place well before a ‘crisis’ strikes. Find more about why you need a status page in another article on this blog “Transparency is Critical When Sites #FAIL“.
Who is using Public Status Pages?
Here is a list of some of our more well known customers using the WatchMouse Public Status Pages:
- Twitter - http://dev.twitter.com/status
- Mozilla - http://status.mozilla.com/
- Wikipedia - http://status.wikimedia.org/
- WordPress - http://status.automattic.com/
- Read Write Web - http://status.readwriteweb.com/
- Bit.ly - http://status.bit.ly/
- and many more!
More status dashboards (powered by WatchMouse and others too) can be found here.
Improvements in release 4.0
So what is improved in this new release?
- New powerful architecture and storage engines, based on MongoDB
- Highly available and even more scalable (still hosted in the AWS cloud)
- Always up-to-date with latest check results, instead of updated on changes in monitor status
- ‘Moving’ uptime figures over last 24h instead of today’s uptime
- Better “per country” indication, now averages over the last N checks
- Interactive charts, powered by the Google Visualization API
- Zoom-able world map for more details in Europe
- Clear daily uptime charts
- Improved console
- HTML support for public notes, including an HTML editor
- SSL support
What’s next? Your opinion counts!
Some ideas we already have and working on for the next release of the WatchMouse Public Status Pages are:
- Easier (self service) customization directly through the Public Status Pages console
- Browsing back in time (for all charts and history section). The back-end system is ready, now working on the front end
- Long term (monthly) charts
- Private Status Pages (only accessible by authenticated users)
- Real Time Status Pages (Comet/WebSockets support)
- Public Status Widgets for easy integration into many popular blogging engines.
So what would you like to see in our next release? Please let us know in the comments, or contact us by creating a helpdesk ticket.
Mark Pors
CTO & co-founder
February 7th, 2011 at 14:46
Hello,
I like the look of the updated public pages, however would you consider the following addition for the next big release?
Public notes – so you have the ability to save messages, so you could have a standard note for maintenance, one for system error etc.
I’m keen to use the feature for historical reports and charts, do you have an eta for this as my management have been asking for months
Keep up the good work.
Marcus
February 7th, 2011 at 14:56
Hi Marcus,
Thanks!
Re: public notes. You mean a standard text snippet for different situations? Or an automated note triggered by the status of the monitors or by the maintenance period in the monitor settings?
Historical reports: yes, this is really high on our priority list, but we couldn’t implement this with the previous architecture. Now that we moved to MongoDB we are ready to implement that. I don’t have an ETA for it yet, but the hard part is behind us now. I’ll come back to you when I now a release date.
Cheers,
Mark
February 8th, 2011 at 10:25
Guys!
Nice work on the architecture. Should be a nice read, no? Make it a showcase. How you done it? What problems you encountered, what solutions? what decisions, etc.
Keep up the good work!
Cheers!
- Charlie
February 23rd, 2011 at 21:56
Hi Marc,
Private Status Page(s) would be a very smart feature!
Cheers
Nils