New Service: Monitoring the epicenter (DNS) of your online brands (2008-01-24)
Your domain name directs customers to a website where you represent your brand and all that it stands for but are you managing and regularly monitoring the domain name service (DNS) which translates your domain name and brings your customers to you? DNS consistency monitoring can help ensure your business does not lose customers to a slow or faulty DNS.
It is useless to have paid for an expensive and fully redundant web site server (park), if the DNS servers fail to respond, respond incorrectly, or inconsistently. Your DNS must be consistent and correct. Monitoring for DNS consistency is particularly important if you have online services relying on one or more domain names (and that is almost always the case). It doesn't matter if your DNS servers are maintained in-house or outsourced, you need to know if they are doing what they are supposed to do.
WatchMouse's DNS consistency monitoring (now available in closed beta) checks your DNS systems and provides rapid notification of any unexpected DNS behaviour.
The WatchMouse's 'domain' type rule allows you to monitor the consistency of the behaviour of your DNS servers. It queries for a specified domain, performs a number of checks to test the health of your DNS servers and monitors for any difference in behaviour of your name servers. (If you also need to check that a domain name resolves to the correct IP address(es), you can use the 'dns' type rule which will be offered as part of the WatchMouse DNS consistency monitoring).
This new service will be available to all WatchMouse customers with a performance monitoring subscription (Webmaster and higher) and can be configured on the Monitoring Settings page. To set-up DNS consistency monitoring, simply enter the domain name (advanced settings are available).
Fancy participating in our closed beta test?
- Contact us to request participation in the beta.
- Collect all the domain names that are important to your business.
- Go to the Monitoring Settings page.
- Add a 'new rule' and select 'domain' from the type menu, for each of the domains you wish to monitor.
- Specify the other settings you would like for other rule types, hit 'save', and you're done!
- The results of the domain name monitoring appear in your logs, reports, and graphs instantly.
WatchMouse and Domeny.pl join forces in the Polish market (2005-11-24)
Polish websites verified from the visitors' perspective
Kraków, Poland, 2005-11-08 -- WatchMouse and Domeny signed a
reseller and marketing agreement today, joining forces in bringing
site monitoring services to the Polish market.
Using the WatchMouse services, companies will instantly be aware of
upcoming and/or acute incidents related to its web sites of their
clients, and can, as a result, resolve problems in a short time frame.
The websites and their functionality are checked for availability,
speed, and conformance from different locations around the world, now
including Poland. Because the websites are checked in the same way
that visitors are experiencing them, incidents will be detected at an
early stage. Also, using WatchMouse's objective periodical reports, it
is possible for companies to see if the performance is in accordance
with the agreed service levels (SLAs).
WatchMouse extends its network of monitoring stations with a checkpoint
in Kraków, hosted by Domeny.pl. The total number of checkpoints is now 17.
Domeny.pl also provides the Polish language version of the WatchMouse site
and local customer care.
Stan P. van de Burgt, CEO of WatchMouse: "I'm very happy with
this deal. The Polish e-service industry is obviously booming, and
this results in higher awareness of the issues involved with running
web applications that should be available around the clock."
Arkadiusz Szczurowski, CEO of Domeny.pl "We know that WatchMouse products
are one of the best in the World. So we decided to co-operate
with the company, and we take pride in it. We expect this
co-operation to bring both WatchMouse and our business a lot of
advantages and satisfaction. Domeny.pl wants to lead WatchMouse
monitoring service on Polish market and offer it for business
leaders. This will be a great innovation in Poland and also
success. In our view, site monitoring is important, because
stability, performance, and high availability of the web sites is
one of the basic value in all branches of business, both
e-business and other business."
"There are about 4 million companies in Poland. We want to direct
the offer to the most important on Polish market. We think that
the WatchMouse service is a must-have for about 5-10 percent of all
business owners."
About Domeny.pl
Domeny.pl was founded in 1997 and is now providing Internet
services to about 10.000 business customers with products ranging from
Internet domains and hosting services (virtual and dedicated servers), SSL
certificates and other products dealing with internet security.
The company's slogan is: We're Trusted by the Best.
Among its clients are the biggest and the best known Polish and
international companies.
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 analyses are
performed from various locations and over numerous networks,
using a world-wide monitoring network.
In October 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.
What do you want to check with a service such as Watchmouse? (2005-01-31)
As I explained in my previous column, you can use a monitoring service in a number of roles. Common to all these roles is the fact that
you are keeping alive some services for the benefit of your customers,
suppliers, employees or partners. These users are, in the end, all that
counts.
What are the objects that you should be checking? Obviously, the least
you want to do is check the service that is most visible to these users.
This could be the webserver, or a POP or FTP server for example. You
would start by setting up a rule to check the server and a URL. The frequency with which you can monitor (that is: the elapsed
time between checks) is typically limited by the type of subscription
that you have. Only in specific cases would you not check as often as your
subscription allows.
Note that there is a difference between a CONNECT on port 80 rule and a HTTP rule.
The first just connects to the port that the webserver is supposed to
use. The HTTP rule also checks whether the webserver can produce a valid HTTP
response, and whether the document can be found. You probably want the latter check.
Similar reasoning applies to POP and FTP checks. If you set up two different rules on the same host, this allows you to distinguish for example between a broken webserver and a host that is down. If you want even more content
oriented checks, have a look at the so-called PLUG-IN rules.
Additionally, you can set up checks to make sure that your
users are actually using the services that you intend them to. The whole
Internet depends heavily on the domain name system(DNS) functioning correctly. If it does not work properly your users may be directed to
another site than you intended. This could be a configuration error, but
it could also be a defamation hack. In either case, you want to know.
First of all you want to check whether the root servers of the Internet
accurately find the DNS that is serving you. This can be checked with a
DNSNS rule. What you are checking with this rule is whether the registrar's databases are correct. Second, you want to check if that DNS server (and its
slaves) are serving up the proper IP address for the server. For this
you can use the DNSA rule, and it will warn you if the DNS server is not
working or serves up the wrong address. (Note that the hosting party can
change that address at its discretion, as part of a renumbering
operation for example.)
Who should you notify of rule failures? Again, different roles have
different information requirements. You want to notify the person who
can fix things as soon as possible. Mail or SMS/text them directly, you do
not want to be in the loop. You might set up an escalation chain, which
fires off after a certain amount of errors. Note: make sure that
you send the message on a channel that is not affected by the outage: if
your e-mail system does not work, delivering a message to that effect
should not depend on that e-mail system.
The people in charge of overseeing somebody else's service levels should
only get escalation messages, if at all. Rather, they should get the
weekly or monthly service reports.
Peter van Eijk is a management consultant specialized in management of network infrastructures. He can be reached via his contact page.
