Mouse in the House

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 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!