Mouse in the House

Posted by mark on May 25th, 2011

We’re pleased to announce that we’ve joined the Apdex Alliance as a member and bronze sponsor. If you haven’t heard of the Apdex (Application Performance Index) Alliance, they are an organization that supports an open standard – developed by an alliance of companies – that defines a uniform method to report, benchmark, and track enterprise application performance from a user satisfaction perspective.

The Apdex generates a numerical measure of user satisfaction and is the first user experience metric that is comparable across all transactional applications.

As part of our partnership, we’ve integrated the Apdex into our performance monitoring suite, including the creation of a widget that all of our subscribers can now use. Subscribers can link their performance monitors to the widget and have a customized performance-testing indicator on their site. Apdex charts and reports are also now available in the WatchMouse subscriber dashboard.

The Apdex and its standardized method of performance benchmarking are well-known and well-respected in the IT world. We’re pleased to be integrating their user satisfaction data, which perfectly complements our performance testing and monitoring.

See below for an example of an Apdex integrated widget. If you are a WatchMouse customer and would like to create your own widget you can contact us.

Happy monitoring!

Live Apdex Report

 

Apdex Report is powered by WatchMouse website monitoring.

Posted by mark on April 26th, 2011

Social networking sites are a global phenomenon. Millions now go online on a daily basis to engage in one or more social networks including Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn.

What’s the problem with that? With millions of site visitors and complicated web pages with exhausting amounts of content coming from multiple sources, these sites can slow to an Internet snail’s pace.

Why speed matters?

• Web visitors have really short attention spans and high expectations. They will abandon a website in nano-seconds if it lags.
• Google is now using load times as a factor in search placement. Believe it or not, this still matters even to the social network giants.
• “Bad will” or brand damage happens at the speed of light. Sites start to get sluggish, people talk, start tweeting and it’s all over the Internet.

So how are these sites stacking up? We recently monitored the page load time performance of a public profile page of 22 of the world’s top social sites using our real browser monitoring product. We tested these sites from April 6 through April, 20, 2011 using the combination of measuring a profile page using real browsers, which we believe gives us the best representation of actual performance from a real user’s perspective.

Fifty percent of the sites had slow load times. Facebook at 1091 milliseconds, blew away the competition by a long shot and had the fastest page load time during the reporting period, which is fairly impressive considering it also has the most traffic. Coming in last was the ailing MySpace at 7859 milliseconds followed closely by Friendster at 6473 milliseconds and Posterous at 5973 milliseconds.

We use two performance limits to decide if a website’s load time is good, ok or bad: two and four seconds, based on the research conducted by Akamai in 2009. Anything two seconds or under is considered good. Anything over four seconds is considered bad.

Facebook has set a standard and shows that speed can be achieved regardless of traffic and page complexity. Speed still isn’t a top priority for a lot of these very popular sites, and with 50% of the sites being too slow, there is still a lot of room for improvement.

• You can test any website using our free tool: http://loads.in/
• This survey is based on WatchMouse Real Browser Monitoring.
• The current status of all of the social network sites monitored can be seen here: http://social.downornot.com/

Posted by mark on April 1st, 2011

URL shorteners. Lots of people use them every day – including the team at WatchMouse. URL shorteners like bit.ly, Google’s goo.gl, Twitter’s t.co, and Facebook’s fb.me are widely used nowadays, but how reliable and how fast are they really?

We took a look at the pros and cons of URL shorteners in March 2010, and thought it only fair to see how URL shorteners are performing one year later.

And, what a difference a year makes! Last year, Facebook’s fb.me was at the bottom of the list in terms of speed, but this year fb.me tops our list joining Google’s goo.gl and BudURL with 100% uptime and a much improved loading speed.

Why (not) using URL Shorteners

There are some obvious pros and cons of URL shorteners.

On the plus side:

• URL shorteners obviously provide useful features like making a long URL shorter (e.g. so it fits easily in a Twitter message)
• They enable you to track and analyze clicks on a specific short URL
• Some URL shorteners like t.co and mcaf.ee also provide some browsing safety by analyzing the target URL for harmful website code or phishing attempts

But on the down side, URL shorteners also introduce:

• An additional single point of failure: when a URL shortener service is down (or corrupt) the link won’t work
• Additional load time for a page to fully load

URL Shorteners Uptime

WatchMouse monitored the most popular URL shorteners from February 24 – March 28, 2011 to find out how they are doing in terms of availability and speed. During that time we monitored 25 URL shorteners and collected the uptime and performance statistics. Uptime is an issue for URL shorteners because it has a direct impact on the uptime availability of the website that the URL shortener actually directs to. The uptime results are shown in the chart below:

Uptime is still clearly an issue for some of the URL shorteners, but what a difference a year makes! Last year Facebook’s fb.me landed at the lower regions of our list. Things have changed dramatically this year and now only fb.me, goo.gl, and BudURL scored a perfect 100%. And to be fair, Twitter’s t.co would also score a perfect 100% if they weren’t blocked from China, which is obviously out of their control.

According to our data, twurl.cc, tr.im and to. appear to be dead in the water and inactive with over 31 days of downtime. Digg.com racked up over 19 days of downtime, while snurl.com had over 14 hours of downtime, making them our worst performers and by far the slowest among the active URL shorteners.

URL Shorteners Speed

The performance results can be seen in the chart below:

Note that we left out the resolve time in this chart, please see the full report for a version with the resolve time included and what it means.

• lnkd.in is the slowest and adds over 700 milliseconds on average to the page load time after the click on a link (excluding the resolve time), which is really way too much for just a URL redirection. This substantially affects the user experience.
• goo.gl is super speedy and does a redirection in just about 100 milliseconds, which is really impressive we think.

Live URL Shortener Status Report

We continuously monitor URL shorteners and share the results publicly through our website portal. The real-time status of each of the sites and a seven-day history can be found at http://url-shorteners.public-website-status.com/. You can also receive Twitter alerts so you know immediately when URL shorteners go down by following http://twitter.com/url_shorteners.

URL Shortener Popularity

It’s not obvious to measure the popularity of URL shorteners, but traffic metric for the domain does give an indication:

This information comes from Alexa and was requested for the five most “famous” URL Shorteners.

Seeing that bit.ly is seeing way more traffic than the others we can conclude they are doing a very good job in terms of availability and speed.

[disclaimer: bit.ly and Twitter are WatchMouse customers]

Methodology and full report

The URL shorteners were checked every five minutes from one of the 58 WatchMouse global website monitoring stations. For each short URL, only the redirection was measured, not the actual loading of the target page. The redirection was expected to complete within four seconds without any errors (like when a server error occurred or if the expected target URL location was not found in the http header). If that time was exceeded, WatchMouse verified the results using another of its monitoring stations and the result was counted as unavailable.

The full report can be found here: Performance and Uptime of URL Shorteners.

What do you think? Have URL shorteners improved dramatically over the past year or is there still room for improvement? We welcome your feedback and comments!

Posted by mark on February 17th, 2011

Ever wonder how fast your website (or any other website) loads from different locations around the world? Especially if your site relies in part on third party content, the user experience at various cities can be very different indeed!

Using our WatchMouse Performance Monitoring service API, Loads.in is a convenient webmaster tool that allows you to measure just how fast a website loads in a real browser from over 50 locations worldwide – on every continent except Antarctica!

Websites can be particularly susceptible to slow page load speeds when they need to load a high amount of components (images, JavaScript, third party content) to render the complete page.

The free, Loads.in tool checks your site utilizing a real browser, and provides snapshots and waterfall charts for each check.  A selection of browser profiles is available too, and include Safari, Chrome, Internet Explorer and Firefox

Simply enter the full URL of the page you want to check in Loads.in, and the page is retrieved by a browser at a random location. For each subsequent check you can choose a specific location*.

The Loads.in results presented include:

• The page load time of the website
• Snapshots at different times during the loading of the page
• Errors or warnings if they occur
• A complete timing breakdown of all elements of your page in a “waterfall chart”
• The option to download the timing results in the HTTP Archive (HAR) format

*Locations include: Amsterdam, Antwerp, Cologne, Copenhagen, Dublin, Glasgow, Groningen, Lille, Lisbon, London, Madrid, Manchester, Munich, Oslo, Padova, Paris, Stockholm, Zurich, Bucharest, Kharkov (Ukraine), Krakow, Moscow, Vilnius (Lithuania), Melbourne, Sydney, Cape Town, Bangkok, Haifa (Israel), Jakarta, Kuala Lampur, Mumbai, Nagano, Shanghai, Singapore, Guadalajara, Vancouver, Austin, Chicago, Dallas, Florida and NYC.

Check it out and let us know what you think. We value your feedback and hope you find Loads.In to be a useful tool and resource.

Happy Monitoring,

Mark Pors
CTO & co-founder

Posted by mark on February 7th, 2011

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

Posted by stan on December 28th, 2010

We monitored and tested the leading shopping websites in six different countries to see how they fared in the lead up to and during the holiday shopping weeks.

The 300-plus websites we tested in the United States, United Kingdom, Spain, Germany, Belgium, and The Netherlands performed quite well overall. The country with the most sites in the 100% uptime category was Germany with 33% of the 30 tested sites experiencing no downtime during the reporting period. Coming in second was the United Kingdom with 31% of the 89 websites experiencing 100% uptime, followed by Spain with 29% of 17 websites and the United States with 27% of 100 sites with no downtime. The Netherlands had only 12% of the 91 sites tested with 100% uptime, while Belgium sites performed worst of all with only 10% of the 83 sites tested with 100% uptime.

You can read the full performance reports and view a list of the websites monitored in each country by clicking on the following: United States, United Kingdom, Spain, Germany, Belgium, and The Netherlands. You can also view the current live health of each of the 327 websites we monitored, by visiting the Public Status Pages for each country: United States, United Kingdom, Spain, Germany, Belgium, and The Netherlands.

Happy Holidays and we look forward to sharing more monitoring news in 2011!

The WatchMouse Team