Mouse in the House

Posted by admin on June 21st, 2011

Performance transparency is critical for both small and large companies alike, which is why we’re pleased to announce the introduction of a new product feature to our WatchMouse monitoring services today – the WatchMouse Joomla widget!

The new widget enables Joomla users to easily publish their WatchMouse Public Status Page/s within the Joomla CMS system by simply installing an open source component and module. The Joomla component uses the WatchMouse API to download the monitoring results, and push them directly to a Joomla website, letting users display live availability and performance information on their Joomla-built website.

The new WatchMouse Joomla widget allows Joomla users, developers and site designers to:

• Publish hourly, daily or weekly availability and performance data
• Display data using a range of maps, charts and graphs
• Adjust the look and feel using CSS or use a selection of pre-existing styles which can be tweaked

View a live sample Providing a simple way for Joomla users to display the status of their critical services can give any size company immediate transparency with their users. We aim to create and introduce more Public Status Page widgets for organizations like Joomla who are the backbone for millions of websites including Tumblr, WordPress, Blogger and more. A WatchMouse Public Status Page (free to WatchMouse subscribers) is a web page that informs customers on the status of a website or service. It can reduce costly customer service interactions and create goodwill with end users. A Public Status Page shows the current status of a specified selection of online services and can display updates and public announcements for customers. The pages are hosted on the Amazon cloud infrastructure, ensuring that a company’s status pages are highly scalable. It also ensures that status pages continue to be publicly available even if a company’s main site or service is not. To get started:

• Sign up for a free 30-day trial or log into your existing WatchMouse account
• Set up a Public Status Page following the instructions published at the bottom of this page
• Download the widget from our Joomla page
• Login to your Joomla site and navigate to Extensions -> Install/Uninstall
• Click Browse, locate the component’s zip file and click the Upload File & Install button
• Click Browse again and locate the module’s zip file and click the Upload File & Install button
• Your installation is complete, navigate to Components -> Watchmouse PSP Widget and check our tutorial

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 mark on December 17th, 2010

The URL shortener tr.im appears to be near death. They pulled the plug quite a while ago and are no longer accepting URL shortening requests, but they kept their systems for existing shortened URL’s running.

This past April, the company stated “we would like to shut down the API and redirection service by the end of 2010″. The last few days the service shows a downtime of eight hours per day – perhaps a signal of their last flickerings of life?

WatchMouse monitors 24 URL shorteners, and currently four of them are broken:

• snurl.com: this service has an average uptime of under 90%, rendering the service useless.
• to.: down and out of business
• tr.im: shuttering and out of business
• twurl.cc: down and out of business

Some companies that cease operating their URL shortener leave the shortened links live even though they are in essence out of business; others do not.

Many links on the Internet break because companies providing URL shorteners go out of business or change their policies or priorities. The people that have used these services to shorten a URL are typically not given advance warning, and are simply left with error messages.

And then there is Digg. They had a URL shortener service, but decided to use it internally only. According to this article the promise was made, however, to keep existing short URLs working, but our monitoring reveals that is no longer the case as of November 30.

We recommend you choose your URL shortener wisely, e.g. bit.ly whose core business is URL shortening and should be around for a long time. (Disclaimer: bit.ly is a WatchMouse customer).

Happy Holidays and Happy URL Shortening!
The WatchMouse Team

Posted by mark on November 23rd, 2010

Cloud computing has made it easy to build applications that run reliably even under a heavy load, and developers need to know if and when the cloud, and thus their application, is having problems.
We’re very pleased to announce today that we’ve acquired Cloud Status for iPhone, an application originally created by Alasdair Allan, noted author, software programmer and expert iOS developer. Our collaboration and acquisition of the Cloud Status for iPhone app has allowed us to not only add new features in the latest version 4.4 release, but also to make the app available for FREE to the developer community and IT departments around the world who depend on cloud based services to run their businesses.

The Cloud Status for iPhone version 4.4 release includes the following features:

• FREE to download
• Support for iOS4
• Support and reporting for Amazon Web Services, Google App Engine, Google Apps, Microsoft Windows Azure, and Rackspace Cloud
• Fully supported retina display in iPhone 4

Each of the supported cloud services has a separate page and details the status for the various services provided. A quick read indicator denotes the status for each service: the status for the service is good, there is a problem with the service, or the service is down. Clicking on each service component provides further information as to the current status of that component, and any problems it might be experiencing.

We greatly respect and admire the work of Alasdair Allen on the iOS platform, and we plan to work with him in the future to create additional applications that will support other WatchMouse performance monitoring services.

For more information click here.

Posted by stan on October 31st, 2010

When Gmail is slow, Amazon trips, when there is a Facebook issue, or Foursquare’s API crashes, people get upset, and tens of thousands reveal their anxiety on social networks.

Every time there is a major outage, security issue, or malfunction we see this pattern of raised anxiety, doubts, and questioning of services in the cloud in general.

This makes perfect sense of course, as Web apps and Web services have become more prevalent and are now an essential part of our daily habits and work. The advantage of Web apps is compelling: simply grab a PC, iPad, laptop or mobile phone and you have everything at your fingertips. But there is a downside too: we become dependent on the cloud infrastructure and our connectivity to the network.

The reality is that software and services break. Desktop software normally breaks with one user at a time, although millions will be affected over time. If a Web app breaks however, hundreds of thousands are affected at the same time. There is also a psychological effect: when software on a computer fails, people often feel (partly) responsible for it. With Web apps, the provider is the only one to blame.

So even if Web apps are far more reliable than local apps – and I believe this is often the case – the public outcry is far more extensive. Especially now, when typing “#fail” on social networks like Twitter and Facebook, is only seconds away.

What does this imply for the companies behind the Web apps we use every day? The single most important thing is to have the communication channels in place well before a ‘crisis’ strikes.

I personally suggest having the following at minimum:

1. A blog or status page that is hosted independent (and scalable!) from the main website and services. Easy, predictable, standard names should be used: blog.company-or-brand.comand status.company-or-brand.com, respectively. A good example: status.readwriteweb.com. Preferably these pages should include up-to-date, live, stats.
2. A Twitter name where one can post quick updates. If possible @company-or-brand should be used here too. Example: @rww.

This first level of transparency makes it easy for people to get informed and immediately results in lower anxiety levels. This in turn, helps to stamp out rogue stories in times of crisis, and reduces the load on the company’s customer service contact center.

Many companies have set up public status pages already.

• Admit failure as soon as possible, preferably by someone high up in the organization
• Make sure the posts and updates sound human, no standard sound bites
• Explain in detail who and what is affected (which regions, percentage of customers, what services, etc.)
• Publish a detailed timeline of the outage, and start maintaining this immediately after the first event
• Share detailed post mortem reports and lessons learned after the crisis is over
• Read more here for a more detailed analysis of the psychology of transparency

If these guidelines are followed, the added benefit is that it actually induces and instills a higher trust in the company and its brand – not less. It also gets the message across quickly and efficiently, so it can then be relayed across social networks, instead of leaving it up to the guesses of the public or the media. Finally, it will save serious money in the company’s contact center, as it sets the right expectations.

Companies that are transparent about issues regarding their services will actually gain kudos and trust.

So the next time there is an issue with your favorite application on the Web and www.your-favorite-app.com is not working: you might want to check out status.your-favorite-app.com to see if there is up-to-date information before you type “#fail”. A Public Status Page may just be waiting for you there.

Stan P. van de Burgt
CEO and co-founder of WatchMouse

Posted by mark on July 1st, 2010

Soccer (also knows as football in the rest of the world) team sites, sports and social media sites are experiencing increased traffic – with big spikes during the match and after scores – due to the 2010 FIFA World Cup competition. We thought it would be interesting to measure the uptimes of the websites associated with the qualifying FIFA World Cup teams, the six Federation websites and FIFA.com.

Today we released a new report with the findings of how the websites associated with the 2010 World Cup performed. We were able to test and measure availability from all over the world, and specifically from South Africa with our newly placed monitoring station in Cape Town.

Coincidence (or maybe not?) that a number of the sites with the poorest uptimes were those of teams that failed to qualify among the final eight teams in the semi-finals. Only 10 sites had 100% uptimes and that includes the team site of The Netherlands!
Hup, Holland, Hup! That’s Go, Holland, Go! for our English speaking friends. Hmmmm….wonder who we’re rooting for???

Click here to read the full report or visit the public status page and view the live status and statistical data.

Posted by admin on March 10th, 2010

Welcome to our new blog, Mouse in the House. We’ve been busy these past few months improving our WatchMouse web site with a new home page, navigation and content. As part of those improvements and in addition to our Labs blog which is geared toward more technical types, we’ve added Mouse in the House, a general blog for news and information about WatchMouse, what we’re working on, industry insight and opinion.

We’ll also make company product announcements here so you will be the first to know when we release new products, or make product enhancements and improvements.

Today we released several reports that measured the availability and uptime of the companies’ websites that make up the different Stock Exchange indexes in 11 countries (NASDAQ website status, FTSE 100 website status, CAC 40 website status, OMX Stockholm 30 website status, DAX 30 website status, FTSE MIB website status, IBEX 35 website status, AEX website status, BEL 20 website status, ASX 50 website status, SMI website status). The websites we monitored were of the largest public companies in the world…and a lot of them didn’t fair too well.

We thought it would be fun to stack all the exchanges against each other to see which country’s companies had the best uptimes. Drum roll please…Sweden’s OMX 30 companies had the best aggregated uptime with 99.42%, the United State’s NASDAQ companies came in second with 99.4%, and France’s CAC 40 companies in third with 99.19%. The worst was Australia’s ASX 50 companies with 97.52%.

Stay tuned for more news, information and opinion and watch out….there’s a Mouse in the House!