News
WatchMouse widget 1.1 released (download widget) (2005-12-17)
WatchMouse releases version 1.1 of their Apple Dashboard site monitoring widget.
NETHERLANDS, 2005-12-16. By means of the WatchMouse widget Apple users get direct insight into the accessibility of their own Internet site. The widget can be downloaded for free from the Apple website.
At regular intervals the dashboard widget checks one or more sites from the users own computer. Also, the availability of the site during the last 72 hours is registered. A problem is followed by an alert, which is then verified by all WatchMouse control stations.
Features
- Checks your website from your own computer every 1, 5, 15, 30, or 60 minutes (new in this release).
- Displays the uptime over the last 72 hours.
- Alerts you in case of an error and...
- Verifies errors from all the WatchMouse worldwide monitoring stations
The new version also fixes some minor bugs.
The free WatchMouse site monitoring widget can be downloaded from the Apple website , and requires Mac OS X 10.4 (Tiger) or later.
http://www.apple.com/downloads/dashboard/networking_security/watchmousesitemonitor.html
New version of WatchMouse widget available (2006-10-03)
WatchMouse widget for Apple computers has been expanded: from local monitoring to worldwide monitoring.
The WatchMouse Site Monitoring Dashboard widget was already available for local monitoring, but the current version (2.0.4) can now also be linked to your WatchMouse account.
The widget, which already checked one website every 1, 5, 15, 30 or 60 minutes from your own computer, can now also be used to display the checks of the websites in your account and the availability of these websites during the past 24 hours. In the event of a malfunction, a check is performed by all WatchMouse monitoring stations. The widget provides an immediate warning or a warning after 2 to 5 successive errors.
The expanded WatchMouse Site Monitoring widget can be downloaded free of charge from the WatchMouse website and can be installed within 1 minute. URL: http://www.watchmouse.com/widget/dashboard_widget.php
WatchMouse Public Status Pages: your own public website health page in two clicks! (2009-08-19)
Today we move the WatchMouse Public Status Pages (WMPSP) out of beta, making them available for all WatchMouse customers free of charge!
What is a Public Status Page?
A public status page is a web page that informs your customers on the status of your services, inspired by similar pages from many organisations like Amazon, Apple, Google, but also ISPs, financial institutions and other organisation who deliver critical services to other companies or the general public. Well-known examples are:
On our Public Status Pages the current status of your selection of on-line services can be displayed, and updates (public announcements) can be placed there for your customers. The pages are hosted on the Amazon cloud infrastructure, ensuring that your status page is highly scalable.
It also ensures that your status pages continue to be available even if your main site or service is not.
Should my organization have a Public Status Page?
There is a strong trend to inform customers as soon as possible when certain services become unavailable, and announce maintenance well in advance. If you would like to provide your customers a dedicated status page for the on-line services you provide to them, WMPSP is a very efficient and cost-effective solution for your organisation. You can have a Public Status Page set up in minutes by creating one or more rules in your WatchMouse account, set up a public folder, and move these rules into this folder. Using the WMPSP setting page you can post announcements, annotate current issues, and optionally set up a special host name (CNAME) so people can access the status page using your domain name, e.g. status.yourdomain.com.
How does it work?
After you have set up a public folder with monitoring rules in your account, the status of these rules will be pushed to http://status.watchmouse.com/NNN automatically (where NNN is a unique id for your status page). Make sure the settings of the rules, and especially the timers for the performance thresholds are according to your standards / SLA. You may want to have a similar set of rules with more strict thresholds for internal use so you will get notified well before your Public Status Page is update. Note that you can have your own host name as well, i.e.status.yourdomain.com instead of http://status.watchmouse.com/NNN
Whenever there is a performance or availability issue, you can annotate this in your WatchMouse account and this information (e.g. "our technicians are working on a solution, expected to be available at 16:00") will be pushed to the WMPSP as well. Similarly, you can announce maintenance or downtime in the same procedure and this will be listed in the announcement section of your Public Status Page.
All Public Status Page are hosted on the Amazon web services infrastructure, making it independent from your own servers availability and ensuring a very high availability and scalability.
Get started now!
- Login into your account and go to the standard rule settings page
- Create a new rule folder for each WMPSP you would like to set up, and create rules within those folder that are representative for the availability of your main services.
- Go to the WMPSP setting page and click the [add] button, and select a folder you created in the previous step.
- Optionally you can also add a host name within your own domain in the CNAME field. Not that you have to add a CNAME record to you DNS for this host name pointing to status.watchmouse.com.
- Click [make public] and you're done! Note that it might take a minute or two before the status page is actually available, since the data has to be transferred to the Amazon AWS platform first.
- Test your WMPSP by clicking on the Name and/or CNAME links in the public folder listing. Observe that each rule has it's own detail page which looks like this: WMPSP for the WatchMouse web site
- Note that the name and logo shown can be changed in your account details
- Next you can add announcements to your WMPSP in case you have scheduled maintenance for one of more services or when actual issues arise and you would like to update your customers about the progress fixing it.
Press releases
WatchMouse releases new Site Performance Monitoring Widget for Apple users (download widget) (2006-10-22)
WatchMouse releases 2.0 widget for dashboard, aimed at Internet site performance monitoring.
NETHERLANDS, 2006-10-23. By means of the widget Apple users can get direct insight into the performance of their own Internet site. The widget can be downloaded for free from the Apple website.
In 2002, WatchMouse (www.watchmouse.com) introduced a new concept for Internet site monitoring. By means of ongoing simulation of Internet visitors the performance of sites and servers is verified. If a site is not responding, an alert message is sent immediately through SMS, pager, Instant Messenger or e-mail. The sites are checked from over twenty monitoring stations worldwide. This is done 24 hours per day, seven days per week. The service is completely web based: customers don't have to install software, everything is 100% self-service, which keeps the costs low.
The three founders of WatchMouse, Niels Eijsbroek, Stan van de Burgt and Mark Pors are enormous Mac-fans with a total of twenty Macs in their possession. The monitoring widget is quite unique: it is a combination of a desktop and a hosted application. When the widgets detects a problem with the site it is checking, it alerts the user with a 'beep', followed by the launch of a web browser, which is directed to a web application on watchmouse.com. There the site is checked from over 20 different locations worldwide.
Worldwide monitoring
The new version (2.0.4) brings continuous performance monitoring, even when the Mac is not connected to the Internet, by connecting the widget to a WatchMouse account (free or paid). In October 2005, WatchMouse released the first version of this widget, which was downloaded over 10.000 times.
WatchMouse has made the widget available free of charge "because we have become addicted to it, ever since we started using the first beta version of the widget", says creative director Niels Eijsbroek. "We give the widget away for free mainly for the fun part. And of course it's also important to bring site performance monitoring to the attention of our fellow Apple-users."
The free WatchMouse site monitoring widget can be downloaded from the Apple website:
http://www.apple.com/downloads/dashboard/networking_security/watchmousesitemonitor.html
About WatchMouse
Companies can easily monitor their own Internet sites using WatchMouse's monitoring service. WatchMouse has been monitoring Internet sites and e-commerce applications for companies throughout the world since 2002. WatchMouse has thousands of customers in more than 70 countries. The services supplied by WatchMouse are available in nine languages, and analysis are performed from various locations and over numerous networks, using a world-wide monitoring network.
In 2005, WatchMouse was voted a Deloitte Rising Star in the Netherlands, as part of the Fast 50 awards; the list of the 50 fastest growing technology companies.
Further information can be found at: www.watchmouse.com
WatchMouse develops monitoring widget for Apple users (download widget) (2005-10-21)
WatchMouse has developed a new widget for dashboard, aimed at Internet site monitoring.
NETHERLANDS, 2005-10-13. By means of the widget Apple users can get direct insight into the accessibility of their own Internet site. The widget can be downloaded for free from the Apple website.
Last month, WatchMouse was voted a Deloitte Rising Star in the Netherlands, as part of the Fast 50 awards; the list of the 50 fastest growing technology companies.
In 2002, WatchMouse (www.watchmouse.com) introduced a new concept for Internet site monitoring. By means of ongoing simulations of Internet traffic the accessibility of sites and servers is checked. If a site is not responding, an alert message is sent immediately through SMS, telephone, Instant Messenger or e-mail. The sites are checked from sixteen monitoring stations worldwide. This is done 24 hours per day, seven days per week. The service is completely web based: customers don't have to install software, everything is 100% self-service, which keeps the costs low.
The three founders of WatchMouse, Niels Eijsbroek, Stan van de Burgt and Mark Pors are enormous Mac-fans with a total of fifteen Macs in their possession.
The monitoring widget is quite unique: it is a combination of a desktop and a hosted application. When the widgets detects a problem with the site it is checking, it alerts the user with a 'beep', followed by the launch of a web browser, which is directed to a web application on watchmouse.com. There the site is checked from 16 different locations worldwide.
Every five minutes
Every five minutes the dashboard widget checks one or more sites from the users own computer. Also, the availability of the site during the last 72 hours is registered. A problem is followed by an alert, which is then verified by all WatchMouse control stations.
WatchMouse has made the widget available free of charge "because we have become addicted to it, ever since we started using the first beta version of the widget", says CCO Niels Eijsbroek. "We give the widget away for free mainly for the fun part. And of course it's also important to bring site monitoring to the attention of our fellow Apple-users."
The free WatchMouse site monitoring widget can be downloaded from the Apple website:
http://www.apple.com/downloads/dashboard/networking_security/watchmousesitemonitor.html
About WatchMouse
Companies can easily monitor their own Internet sites using WatchMouse's monitoring service. WatchMouse has been monitoring Internet sites and e-commerce applications for companies throughout the world since 2002. WatchMouse has thousands of customers in more than 70 countries. The services supplied by WatchMouse are available in eight languages, and analysis are performed from various locations and over numerous networks, using a world-wide monitoring network.
Further information can be found at: www.watchmouse.com
