Mouse in the House

Posted by mark on March 15th, 2011

When setting up a new monitor, we monitor by default from all stations that support the selected protocol or monitor type. In most cases that means your site or server is monitored from all our, currently, 56 stations.

Depending on your situation and requirements, this default might be desired, but maybe it is not. Deciding how to pick your monitoring locations is pretty straightforward:

• If you have a global audience we recommend to use the default setting. In that case a random monitoring station is selected for each individual check.
• If you have a global audience and would like to monitor evenly from all locations you will have to change the scheduling algorithm to “sequential”, see below how to do that.
• If you have an audience in multiple countries, but not all, simply make a custom selection of the stations in the countries you are interested in.
• If your visitors come from a single county, simply pick a station from that country, and change the scheduling algorithm to “master”.

So that was no rocket science right? Next: how to actually set that up.

First of all the default setting. Here you specify the setting for all new monitors you create. Simply go to the Account preferences and find the “checkpoint selection”. Select all the stations you want to be used in your monitoring pool. Note that a minimum of three stations is required. The reason is that for some monitoring errors (like time-out’s) we perform a second opinion check from another location than the one that reported an error to prevent false alerts.

Existing monitors will not be affected by the changes you made in the account preferences.

To change individual monitors, go to the Monitor settings and click on a monitor (or create a new one). The “Checkpoint order algorithm” and the “Checkpoint selection” settings can be found in the “Expert mode”.

The “Checkpoint order algorithm” determines how the monitoring scheduler operates. The following settings are possible:

• Random: a random checkpoint is chosen each time this monitor is checked. This is the default.
• Master: the first check is always done from the checkpoint specified by you. If an error occurs, the second-opinion check is performed from a random (other) checkpoint.
• Sequential: all checkpoints are used in a fixed order (round robin)
• Sticky: same as random, but when a checkpoint detects an error, the monitor will be checked only from that location until the error disappears.

Selecting a specific set of stations is done at the “Checkpoint selection”. Simply check the check-box and you’ll find the same view as in the account preferences, enabling you to select the stations you want to participate for this specific monitor.

Please leave a comment if you have questions about this or open a ticket at the helpdesk.

Post by Mark Pors. Mark is CTO and co-founder of WatchMouse. His favorite editor is emacs, but he hardly gets to use it nowadays.

‘WatchMouse Weekly’ tweets and corresponding blog posts aims to be an introduction with tips and tricks for getting the most out of your WatchMouse monitoring. For all ‘WatchMouse Weekly’ blog posts go here.

Posted by simone on February 22nd, 2011

Our new ‘WatchMouse Weekly’ tweets and corresponding blog posts aims to be an introduction with tips and tricks for getting the most out of your WatchMouse monitoring. Written predominantly by our architects and coders, ‘WatchMouse Weekly’ will provide suggestions about functions you might not otherwise find.

We’ll let you know who’s produced each post so that you can start to know the expertise and personalities that make up the WatchMouse team. So, to the first tip…

An alert escalation hierarchy can be set up in the “contacts” tab, under your “monitoring” dashboard, after creating a contacts group. Corresponding to the number of detected errors, your escalation hierarchy can issue alerts to a range of contacts. For example, initial alerts could be sent to your webmaster. Following the continuous identification of the same error, further alerts could be issued to IT managers and eventually after many consecutive errors, an alert could be sent to your CTO. Your monitors can also be set to only alert your daytime staff during their working hours. If errors are detected outside standard working hours, alerts can be sent to your on-call staff.

In addition, the “expert mode” link (available in the “monitors” tab, under your “settings” menu) allows you to set up maintenance schedules, limit monitoring to certain times/days and customize your monitor to alert different contacts.  For full instructions refer to: http://www.watchmouse.com/howto/Getting-Started-with-WatchMouse-Performance-Monitoring.html

Post by Simone Maier. I’m the Product Marketing Manager at WatchMouse. I found WatchMouse while working at a domain registrar; attracted by the clever and flexible approach of Mark (CTO) and Stan (CEO), I joined in 2007. I help write many of WatchMouse’s guides and marketing communications, support our Resellers and our sales activities. I’m based out of the TechHub in London.

Posted by mark on March 16th, 2010

URL shorteners. We use them. You use them. Lots of people use them. URL shorteners like bit.ly are widely used nowadays, but are they really as good as they appear to be?

Mouse in the House digs a bit deeper into the pros and cons of URL shorteners.

On the positive side:

• URL shorteners obviously provide useful features like making a long URL shorter (i.e. 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 twt.tl also provide some browsing safety by analyzing the target URL for harmful website code or phishing attempts

But on the negative 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

WatchMouse website monitoring monitored the most popular URL shorteners for one month to find out how they are doing in terms of availability and speed. During that time we monitored 14 URL shorteners and collected the uptime and performance statistics. The uptime results are shown in the chart below:

Uptime is still clearly an issue for some of the URL shorteners. This is important because it has a direct impact on the uptime availability of the website the URL shortener actually directs to. Only goo.gl and twt.tl score a perfect 100%.

The performance results can be seen in the chart below:

According to our data, Facebook’s fb.me is by far the slowest. It adds over two seconds on average to the page load time after the click on a link.  And, quite a few others still take over half a second of the page load time, which is really way too much for just a URL redirection. This substantially affects the user experience.

Another interesting thing we noticed is that only a few of the URL shorteners optimized their name servers (DNS) for international use – i.e. it takes half a second for some of the URL shorteners just to lookup the IP address that is needed for a browser to retrieve a web page. That means, that while it might be fast for a visitor from the US, a visitor from Asia might get some extra waiting time when using snurl.com, for example.

And, while bitly.pro might offer more options than the free bit.ly (like having your own domain name), the paid version is also slower on average than its free counterpart.

Some details about how we measured all this: The URL shorteners were checked every five minutes from one of the 50 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 be done within eight 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 or a second error was established, WatchMouse verified the results using another of its monitoring stations and the result was counted as either poor availability or unavailable.

We plan to continue to monitor URL shorteners and as of today, plan to share the results publicly through our brand new website portal: http://url-shorteners.public-website-status.com/. Here’s a screenshot:

You can also receive Twitter alerts so you know immediately when URL shorteners go down by following http://twitter.com/url_shorteners.

Now it’s your turn to tell us what you think.  Are URL shorteners useful or can you live without them? Does the additional time to load a page concern you?

Update: as pointed out at in some comments here and at other blogs that followed up on this post: The results of bitly.pro shortheners like tcrn.ch is affected greatly by the name servers of the bitly.pro clients, and those servers are not controlled by the bit.ly people. In the performance chart above the resolve time of tcrn.ch is indeed responsible for the lower overall performance. Binged.it, another bitly.pro client is actually faster, due to a great worldwide DNS performance we saw from our 45 monitoring stations in 26 countries. Also, the bitly.Pro service is actually free!

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!



Posted by admin on October 5th, 2009

For years the industry standard for a web page to load was four seconds. Research indicated that pages loading slower than that cause visitors to leave a web site.

Recently a report by Akamai showed that the new standard is just two seconds: “two seconds is the new threshold in terms of an average online shopper’s expectation for a web page to load”.

Although this research focussed mainly one-commerce sites, one can say this is generally true for all websites. This was confirmed today by usability guru Jacob Nielsen in his report Powers of 10: Time Scales in User Experience: “For Web usability, this means that new pages must display within 1 second for users to feel like they’re navigating freely; any slower and they feel held back by the computer and don’t click as readily”.

Four, two, one…

Test your web page load speed here from ten locations worldwide: Check website.