Downtime Notification

Multiple alert addresses & Escalation (2005-01-31)

In the Addresses section of this site you can now manage address groups. This feature can be used for two purposes:

Multiple addresses

When an error condition is detected, multiple recipients of all types (email, icq, downtime notification/text messaging) can be alerted at the same time.

Escalation

Alternatively, alerts can be sent to different addresses at different stages; E.g. the first time an error occurs, the event is only logged, the second time, an SMS/text message is sent to the administrator and his assistant and the third time, an e-mail is sent to the support desk.

The number of groups you can define is unlimited.

More worldwide downtime notifications, now 6 in total (2005-01-31)

As you may have noticed in your logs, we introduced 3 more downtime notifications last month, now totalling 6 worldwide. The new downtime notifications are located in France, Germany and Texas. More downtime notifications will be added as more people from more countries sign up.

The current status of the downtime notification network can be found on the 'About' tab.

We also changed the test pattern from Master-Slave (with Amsterdam as master) to a random order. In the next release the test pattern will be user-defined (paid packages only).

Display your downtime notification on your homepage (2005-01-31)

We added a small banner to the banner page at this website which shows the downtime notification of your website for the last seven days. It is recreated every day so it will show the up to date statistics.

Just copy the HTML code to the right of the banner of your choice, paste it in your home page, and it will show the most current statistics for your website(s).

First downtime notification in China (2005-01-31)

In just weeks after our UK downtime notification went live, the WatchMouse network of monitoring downtime notifications has been extended again, this time with a monitoring downtime notification at the datacenter of ONE-iAdvantage in Hong Kong, China, bringing the total number of downtime notifications to 9.
The current network consists of downtime notifications in:

• Florida, USA
• Texas, USA
• London, United Kingdom
• Sydney, Australia
• Nürnberg, Germany
• Orléans, France
• Amsterdam, The Netherlands (2 downtime notifications)
• Singapore
• Hong Kong, China

The new downtime notification will appear automatically in your logs. You can also set the new downtime notification as the primary downtime notification in your monitoring settings.

The current status of the WatchMouse monitoring network can be found on the 'About' tab of the WatchMouse site.

New downtime notification: London UK (2005-01-31)

The WatchMouse network of monitoring downtime notifications has been extended once more, this time with a downtime notification at the well-connected datacenter of Rackspace in London, UK, bringing the total number of downtime notifications to 8. Currently the network includes:

• Florida, USA
• Texas, USA
• London, United Kingdom
• Nürnberg, Germany
• Orléans, France
• Amsterdam, The Netherlands
• Singapore
• Sydney, Australia

Checkpoints in China and Brazil will follow in the next months.

The new downtime notification will appear automatically in your logs. You can also set the new downtime notification as the primary downtime notification in your monitoring settings.

The current status of the WatchMouse monitoring network can be found on the 'About' tab of the WatchMouse site.

LB Icon chooses WatchMouse for independent website monitoring (2005-01-31)

Customer websites verified from the visitors' perspective

LB Icon and WatchMouse have signed a contract for the continuous monitoring of the websites and services of LB Icons' customers. Using the WatchMouse services, LB Icon expects to raise its service level even higher.

The Application Management & Hosting Services (AM&HS) group of LB Icon maintains the administration and management of servers and applications of a large number of (international) clients. This makes AM&HS responsible for the performance and availability of the websites and Internet applications.

Using the WatchMouse services, AM&HS will instantly be aware of upcoming and/or acute incidents related to the websites of its clients, and can, as a result, resolve problems in a short time frame.
The websites and their functionality are checked for accessibility, speed and conformance from different locations around the world. 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 to see if the performance is in accordance with the agreed service levels (SLAs).

Eveline Aendekerk, MD a.i.: "The door of a shop should never be jammed, websites and the functionality on those sites should simply be accessible and available. Our clients should be able to rely on this completely, so they can focus on their primary business processes, such as communication, interaction and sales.
We chose WatchMouse because of their expertise, and also because of the simplicity and user-friendliness of their system and services".

Stan P. van de Burgt, one of the founders of WatchMouse: "I find it a powerful gesture that LB Icon doesn't just monitor the websites of their clients, but that they selected an external party for this, and on top of that give their clients access to the results. Many companies where the website plays an essential role in business, don't have any awareness of this. They have no idea of the risks and the resulting damage, until the day comes that things actually go wrong"

About Lost Boys

For 11 years Lost Boys has been a major service provider in the area of (mobile) Internet. Lost Boys offers a combination of strategy, design, technical development, implementation, application management and hosting of Internet- and mobile solutions. The Amsterdam based corporation is part of the Lost Boys/IconMedialab Group and is listed on the Stockholm Stock Exchange and Euronext Amsterdam. Lost Boys operates with 600 employees in 7 countries, both in Europe and the United States.

http://www.lostboys.nl/
http://iconmedialab.com/

About WatchMouse

WatchMouse is a service of RoundZero. Since 2001, WatchMouse has been checking Internet sites and e-commerce applications of major companies all over the world. The WatchMouse services are available in 8 languages and analysis is performed through its worldwide monitoring network at different locations and networks. WatchMouse has thousands of users in more than 70 countries.

http://www.watchmouse.com/

European e-commerce sites poorly prepared for Christmas rush (2004-12-24)

Comparison with US "role models" Amazon and Barnes & Noble

THE NETHERLANDS, 20041223 -- Many European e-commerce sites have made only minimal preparations for the increased number of visitors in December. The congestion caused by Christmas meant that, on average, only one in six web sites was continuously available. This was the conclusion of WatchMouse, a Dutch monitoring service provider, following a survey of over 50 European e-commerce sites. Excessive interest from customers can overload the server or have dramatic effect on response times.

During the past month, WatchMouse – at its own initiative – closely monitored over 50 web sites where consumers can shop online. The survey shows that the availability varied from 98% to 99.6%. "This may seem high, but a score of 98% means that a site is not available for half an hour per day. This makes 14 hours a month, or a week a year", says Mark Pors, one of the founders of WatchMouse.

As a comparison to the US market, two "role models of e-commerce" - amazon.com and barnesandnoble.com - were monitored during the same period. Amazon`s performance was similar to that of the average European web shop, whereas Barns & Noble outperformed most e-commerce sites with an downtime notification of 100%.

The consequences of downtime are reflected not only in loss of income. Pors: "A website that is not available can cause stacks of work for your helpdesk and, at the end of the day, damage your brand. The problem is that many website owners are unaware that sites are responding poorly, or not responding at all. If they were aware of this, taking action to intervene is simplicity itself: for example, by adding extra server capacity."

WatchMouse has concluded from its survey that more than 70% of the web sites have not achieved optimum accessibility. Given the increasing trend in online purchases, gigantic sums are involved: Online sales will increase by 44% to €13 billion ($17 billion) in Western Europe over the holidays period, compared to €10 billion ($13 billion) in the US (Forrester Research, November 2004).

December is a top month for purchasing on the internet. Pors: "We see response times and the number of error reports increase dramatically in the days leading up to Christmas."

About WatchMouse

Companies can easily monitor their internet sites themselves, thanks to WatchMouse’s monitoring service.

WatchMouse has been monitoring internet sites and e-commerce applications for companies across the globe since 2001. WatchMouse has thousands of customers in more than 70 countries. WatchMouse services are available in seven languages, and analyses are carried out through the world-wide monitoring network from a range of locations and networks.

WatchMouse publishes first 'Site Availability Index' (2005-06-28)

Only 9 out of 25 funds listed on the Amsterdam stock exchange have sites with good availability

Of the websites of the 25 funds listed on the Amsterdam stock exchange (AEX), only nine display optimal availability. The availability of the other sites, including those of multinationals, ranges from poor to dramatically poor. Unilever has the best result of all websites, with an downtime notification of 99.995%. The site with the lowest availability is that of Wolters-Kluwer, with an downtime notification of 94.80%, which represents more than 37 hours of poor performance, or even unavailability, per month. This was the conclusion drawn from the first Site Availability Index created by WatchMouse, a company supplying monitoring services for websites and e-commerce applications world-wide.

An downtime notification of 99.9% is seen as the minimum acceptable level. This percentage is also often quoted in service level agreements (SLAs) with hosting providers. In order to determine the extent to which the sites of AEX funds achieve satisfactory downtime notification, WatchMouse monitored the sites for more than two months. Downtime was said to occur if a site was not available or did not respond within 8 seconds.

The Site Availability Index for AEX funds (www.watchmouse.com/bereikbaarheidsindex/2005/AEX.html) showed that only nine funds fulfilled the minimum required level of 99.9%. These were Unilever, Philips, AEGON, Numico, Akzo Nobel, ASML Holding, Kon. P&O Nedlloyd, Versatel and Buhrmann. Bringing up the rear were IT company(!) Getronics (96.87%), DSM (96.75%), and Wolters-Kluwer, which with a score of 94.80% is over a day and a half a month ‘off the air’.

The Site Availability Index for AEX funds is an initiative of Emerce and WatchMouse and will be repeated annually.

"Very surprised"

Mark Pors, chief technology officer at WatchMouse, stated that he was "very surprised" by the results. "With many sites, we found an downtime notification that is worse than that of many smaller companies. And this while AEX funds in particular should attach a great deal of priority to their corporate image. A maximum downtime notification is part of the 'brand performance'. Our theory is that, where there are a lot of people involved within an organisation, there are a lot of hands unplugging cables, so to speak. These companies have complex processes, a great many internal changes are made, and outsourcing of various activities means transparency is often at a premium. This is clearly the case with Getronics, for example. The downtime notification of the site at the weekend is 100%, but during the week, when people are working, this decreases dramatically."

Pors suspects that the popularity of the sites could also be a reason for poor availability. "Naturally, sites belonging to AEX funds get a lot more traffic than the smaller businesses. On the other hand, this is no excuse; if we look at large online brokers in the US, for example, all achieve an downtime notification in excess of 99.9%."

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 2001. WatchMouse has thousands of customers in more than 70 countries. The services supplied by WatchMouse are available in eight languages, and analyses are performed from various locations and over numerous networks, using a world-wide monitoring network.

In June 2005, WatchMouse was selected by FEM Business as one of the 25 most promising, innovative companies in the Netherlands.

Further information can be found at: www.watchmouse.com.

Rapidly growing WatchMouse wins Deloitte’s Rising Star award (2005-09-23)

WatchMouse is one of the three winners of Deloitte’s Rising Star award. This award is presented annually to rapidly expanding technology companies less than five years old. WatchMouse has been active worldwide for three years in the area of site and server monitoring. With 16 monitoring stations throughout the world, WatchMouse monitors the availability of customers’ websites, immediately sounding the alarm in the event of problems.

The Rising Stars are presented as part of the Deloitte Technology Fast 50 ceremony, the fifty most rapidly expanding technology businesses. The Rising Stars have the potential to lead the Technology Fast 50 in the near future. Stan van de Burgt (42), Niels Eijsbroek (40) and Mark Pors (38) first came up with the idea for WatchMouse in 2001. The concept was as unique as it was clear: to monitor the availability of sites and servers by constantly simulating web traffic. If a site is not responding or an error is found, the customer is notified immediately by SMS, pager, IM or e-mail. From the moment the concept went 'live', in 2002, the pace has been frenetic: turnover doubled each year. Web sites are now monitored from sixteen monitoring stations worldwide 24 hours a day, seven days a week.

The WatchMouse application is entirely web-based: customers do not have to install software or hardware at their site, and the application excels in its self-service aspects while staying easy to use. This allows WatchMouse to operate with a small core of permanent employees, supplemented by external support. Prospective customers can specify their requirements in detail on the WatchMouse site. A range of starter packages is available, priced from € 17.50 per month up to € 450 per month. 400 paying customers in 40 countries worldwide now make use of WatchMouse’s services. These include hosting companies, government bodies, and companies such as LB Icon, Scania, Siemens, Orange, ING, GeoTrust, Citibank, and Postbank.

Self-service as a success factor

Mark Pors, Chief Technology Officer, says he was “pleasantly surprised by the award”. “I am very happy that the jury shares our vision of self-service and our market approach." Pors sees WatchMouse as “the right initiative at the right moment. Companies are increasingly looking to outsource non-core tasks. However, they want to be able to guide and control this themselves and from their own workplace. Web-based services make this possible." Stan van de Burgt, CEO, sees the simplicity of the WatchMouse site and the various languages in which it is available as the major success factors. "Monitoring websites was an idea that already existed in essence, but had not been worked out in this form. We are geared tightly to 'self service', whereby customers can set up everything themselves and retain total control. Which also means we are able to offer the service at a more attractive price than other players in the market.”

The Rising Star awards were presented on Thursday, 22 September.

WatchMouse

WatchMouse assesses your website and e-commerce applications just like your customers experience them. The checks are carried out from 16 monitoring stations worldwide, and recorded in regular reports. In the event of errors or availability problems, the right people within your organisation will be alerted.

www.watchmouse.com

Meerderheid e-commerce sites kan komende kerstdrukte niet aan (2009-05-14)

WatchMouse voorziet wachtende e-shoppers

UTRECHT 20051201 -- Nu de decemberinkopen weer in alle hevigheid zijn losgebarsten, blijken veel online shops regelmatig 'gesloten' te zijn. Dat concludeert WatchMouse in haar jaarlijkse bereikbaarheidsonderzoek van cadeausites. Het Nederlandse sitemonitoringbedrijf heeft net als vorig jaar een onderzoek gehouden onder webwinkels. Slechts drie sites in het onderzoek haalden de maximale 100%. Het merendeel haalt zelfs niet de score die door hosting providers wordt aangehouden als absoluut minimum.

Veel sites zijn maar matig voorbereid op grote aantallen bezoekers. Door de grote belangstelling raken servers regelmatig overbelast. Ook blijken reactietijden van sites dramatisch dalen. Het onderzoek dat WatchMouse in de weken voor Sinterklaas heeft gehouden, laat duidelijk zien dat sites problemen vertonen naarmate er meer bezoekers in de webwinkels verschijnen.

Om te controleren of e-commerce sites goed bereikbaar zijn, heeft WatchMouse de hele maand november controles uitgevoerd. De downtime notification bleek regelmatig onder de 99.9% te liggen, een grens die in veel service level agreements (SLAs) van hosting providers geldt als minimum. Dat percentage wordt maar door tien van de 25 sites gehaald. Neckermann, Bonaparte en eBay zijn de enigen met een score van 100%. Vorig jaar waren er nog zes sites die een maximale downtime notification haalden.

De bereikbaarheid van Kijkshop, Bart Smit, de Bijenkorf en Wehkamp blijkt verre van optimaal. De score van Wehkamp, 97.27%, betekent bijvoorbeeld dat deze site per dag meer dan een half uur slecht bereikbaar is.

De grootste stijger was Bonaparte (kleding) die van de 17e plaats in 2004 steeg naar een gedeelde eerste plaats. eBay bleef als enige twee jaar achtereen op 1. De grootste daler was ECI die van een gedeelde eerste plaats in 2005 naar de 23ste plaats zakte.

In het licht van de toenemende bestedingen online kan de economische schade voor een site groot zijn. In de eerste zes maanden van dit jaar is er online ruim een miljard euro besteed, concludeert de Thuiswinkel Markt Monitor 2005. De online bestedingen maken met 37% ten opzichte van dezelfde periode vorig jaar bovendien een snelle groei door.

Consument gewend aan snelheid

"In vergelijking met vorig jaar zijn effectieve maatregelen uitgebleven", zegt Mark Pors, CTO van WatchMouse. "Consumenten zijn gewend aan snelheid op internet. Moeten ze wachten op een site, dan blijken ze zeker voor decembercadeaus gemakkelijk naar een andere site te gaan. Veel bedrijven weten echter niet dat hun sites matig bereikbaar zijn.”

Opvallend zijn verder de sites die 100% halen. Pors: “Twee van de drie blijken in het buitenland gehost te worden. Waarschijnlijk is men in de VS (eBay) en Duitdowntime notificationnd (Bonaparte) wel gewend de sites goed te dimensioneren”.

Vorig jaar bleek de kerstperiode overigens nog drukker dan de periode voor Sinterklaas. Om die reden zal WatchMouse ook in de weken voor kerst blijven monitoren. Vlak voor kerst verwacht WatchMouse met de resultaten te komen van die tweede testperiode.

Het onderzoek liep van 1 t/m 30 november 2005. Van 'downtime' is sprake als een site een foutmelding geeft of de HTML na acht seconden niet ontvangen is, en dit vanuit een tweede meetpunt bevestigd is. Het complete bereikbaarheidsonderzoek is te vinden op: http://www.watchmouse.com/availabilityindex/2005/eshops_NL.php

Over WatchMouse

Bedrijven kunnen eenvoudig hun websites controleren door gebruik te maken van de monitoringdienst van WatchMouse. WatchMouse controleert sinds 2002 Internetsites en e-commerce toepassingen van bedrijven over de hele wereld. WatchMouse heeft duizenden klanten in meer dan 70 landen. De dienst is beschikbaar in acht talen en de analyses worden uitgevoerd vanuit een groot aantal locaties in het wereldwijde WatchMouse monitoring netwerk. Eerder dit jaar werd WatchMouse uitgeroepen tot Rising Star in de Deloitte Fast 50. Deze award wordt jaarlijks toegekend aan snel groeiende technologiebedrijven die nog geen vijf jaar bestaan

We guarantee our customers 100% downtime notification. (2010-01-13)

We guarantee our customers 100% downtime notification. To fulfill this guarantee, we use several monitoring systems.
Based on our experiences we can say: WatchMouse is REALLY reliable!

Gerwin Scheeve, Lost Boys

Very impressive feature set and has a real commitment to client care (2010-01-13)

With many hundreds of business clients who expect and deserve over 99.99% downtime notification, in the instances where we do have service issues, WatchMouse alerts us promptly - every time. This allows us to minimize the impact of downtime and interruptions to our clients. WatchMouse isn't just another monitoring service, the team is dedicated to building on an already very impressive feature set and has a real commitment to client care

Michael Bloch, Business Operations Manager, ThinkHost, Inc.

WatchMouse Periodic Vulnerability Scanning has enabled us... (2010-01-13)

WatchMouse Periodic Vulnerability Scanning has enabled us to overcome the time consuming task of managing monitoring internally. The removal of all duplicate findings and neat presentation in the WatchMouse Customer Console further reduces the time Lectric Webservices has to spend on maintaining secure systems.

General Manager, LECTRIC Webservices

Monitoring our 24/7 downtime notification service in an independent way is crucial to our business (2010-01-13)

Monitoring our 24/7 downtime notification service in an independent way is crucial to our business and supports us in delivering on our promise to the customers.

Director, Postbank N.V. (Part of the ING Group)

What do you want to downtime notification 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 downtime notificationing? Obviously, the least you want to do is downtime notification 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 downtime notification the server and a URL. The frequency with which you can monitor (that is: the elapsed time between downtime notifications) is typically limited by the type of subscription that you have. Only in specific cases would you not downtime notification 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 downtime notifications whether the webserver can produce a valid HTTP response, and whether the document can be found. You probably want the latter downtime notification.
Similar reasoning applies to POP and FTP downtime notifications. 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 downtime notifications, have a look at the so-called PLUG-IN rules. Additionally, you can set up downtime notifications 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 downtime notification whether the root servers of the Internet accurately find the DNS that is serving you. This can be downtime notificationed with a DNSNS rule. What you are downtime notificationing with this rule is whether the registrar's databases are correct. Second, you want to downtime notification 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.

Why do you need a monitoring service such as Watchmouse? (2005-01-31)

There are a number of reasons for this, depending on your role in your organization, and what you want to achieve. Each of these roles leads to a different approach for using and setting up the service.

Most likely you are either responsible for keeping a service such as a website online, or you have contracted somebody else to do that for you. Additionally, you could be a consultant or technical architect who wants to get an insight in performance and uptime characteristics of various solutions and services.

If your role is to keep things running, you really want to be notified of problems as soon as possible, before your customers or supervisors notice. You want appropriate error messages and not too many false alarms. As you configure Watchmouse you probably want to have a quick alert by e-mail or SMS/text message when things don't work and have additional diagnostic information downtime notification. In this way, downtime can be kept to a minimum. It is not only the quality of the systems that counts, but also the speed with which you can fix problems.

Your role could also be in overseeing your service providers, whether they are internal or outsourced. In that case, you don't want to be interrupted by these messages, unless the situation becomes dramatic. Instead you would like to look at the weekly report, and see if your service providers are living up to their promises. On the Internet it is easy to get 99% uptime, and you should really be doing better than that. The services that regularly fail to make this grade need attention, to see if another approach to provisioning them works better.

If you are considering technical alternatives for the way you are setting up your e-business, you are most likely interested in typical failure modes. For example, we know from experience that most website problems are software problems, followed by sizing problems. Communications problems are fairly rare, and if they occur they take the form of peering problems: websites cannot be reached from specific networks, even if all networks are operational. One approach using Watchmouse reports is to downtime notification various aspects with different rules. Use one rule to download the homepage, another to downtime notification the DNS and a third to downtime notification connectivity to the hosting centre. In a next column I'll go into the details of this.

Peter van Eijk is a management consultant specialized in management of network infrastructures. He can be reached via his contact page.

Independant, external testing (2005-10-15)

I started to work at Q-go in 2000. Q-go provides companies with self service pages on the Internet. Their customers ask a question in their own language and wording, and immediately get a very relevant answer. The power of the Q-go solution is its natural language technology, which enables it to understand the questions. The Q-go solution is offered as a hosted (ASP) solution, which of course has to work 24 x 7, a new area for me at that time.

At my previous jobs, at universities and research institutes, this was different. We worked from eight to six. If a demo application didn't work, the users just called, and we fixed the problem. And at six, we stopped and went home. All customers and other relations went home too. A nightly malfunction in the server was no problem, as there was no customer there to notice the problem.

At Q-go, this is completely different. A service should be downtime notification all the time. Day and night. Initially there were no tools to test whether our service was downtime notification or not. The only way to test it was to use the application itself. And so I did. During the day, but also at night, I downtime notificationed whether the application was up. Our customers use the Q-go application continuously, and notice immediately when the application fails. Customers would call me in those cases, and it's not very pleasant to hear from your customers about an issue with your service.

So we developed some solutions ourselves to hear before our customers when something was wrong. And to be able to react to problems quickly. But customers kept calling!

How was that possible? Closer investigations revealed that the test system used the same resources (computers, networks, name servers) as the system under test... The test were not performed properly in case of problems. The text-alerts (SMS) did not reach us either. The cause was identical: we used the same hardware, the same network, and the same power (!) as the systems we tested.

My lessons learned:

• Keep the systems that test completely separated from the systems you test.
• Test your services (web servers, mail servers, ...) from the point-of-view of its users: the customer on the Internet.
• Don't forget regular maintenance of your test systems (software and hardware) after the installation!

For me, I'm outsourcing external testing!

Bart Bos, Director, Q-go.com

Website performance is the key to customer satisfaction (2007-06-27)

How often have you typed in the Google URL and received a page that will not load? I am willing to bet that this is a rare occurrence. Despite its busy traffic, Google is a textbook example of a web site that has almost perfect performance and therefore serves a great number of satisfied customers. The market share of the search engine is a resounding confirmation of this. You are assisted quickly, so you come back sooner. Research conducted by JupiterResearch has revealed that visitors to a site only have 4 seconds of patience. If the site has not been loaded by that time, they leave. Error messages also prompt potential customers to go to the competition.

Why do organisations still devote so little attention to the effective availability of their site? Performance is the key to satisfied customers. For many companies, their web site is the face of the organisation. Consumers and also business users of the Internet use the wealth of information on the web to compare purchasing options. It is of immeasurable importance that they are also actually able to find what they are looking for. If this is not possible at one company, competitors are straining at the leash to offer their services through a correctly functioning site.

Coming back to the praise that we had for Google, we see that the search engine has made significant investments in the availability of its web site. The page is run by several machines at various sites. If one crashes there are enough back-up servers that can take over the traffic flows to guarantee optimum performance. In addition, the search machine invests a great deal of time and money in the right hardware and people. Although the site has a difficult task – searching through an index of billions of documents – it is almost always downtime notification and loads fast.

The actual site is unspectacular in construction. This applies to the majority of sites with a high level of availability. Simple sites such as the news site NU.nl are almost always easy to access. Nevertheless, it is not only the layout of the site that determines how the web page performs. Too many photos, long symbols and frills make web sites slower to respond. The fact that the ‘back end’ of the site is not efficiently programmed also contributes to longer loading times. Frequent consultation of background databases is also detrimental to the speed of the page.

Where it often goes wrong is when different people are working on a site, thereby disturbing the links between the various elements. The different parts of the site will work correctly, but the site as a whole will fail to perform. This means long waiting times for people who want to use the services of a company.

Service providers at the upper end of the market are becoming increasingly aware of this. The contracts that they use frequently include a service level agreement (SLA) for the part for which they are responsible. Nevertheless, they regularly make mistakes due to the fact that the promised performance is not subsequently verified (by an independent party). Although it is now essentially part of the contract, there is insufficient actual verification. Ideally, web site performance should become a permanent component of a contract. In addition, clear internal agreements must be made on who has final responsibility for the efficient loading and availability of a site.

Regular testing is also essential for the facilitation of good availability. This will prevent a great deal of errors, keeping the site up and running at crucial times. The storm that blew over the Netherlands at the end of January was a good opportunity to see which sites were prepared for extreme loads and which were not. The site of the Dutch weather institute, KNMI, was almost unreachable, while some logical thought could have protected them from this eventuality. If you know that a major storm is heading towards the country you can be sure that people will search for information on the weather and roads on the Internet. Sites such as those of KLM and Schiphol were also unreachable, while the specially created site Crisis.nl, which had been kept as simple as possible, was able to serve a large number of people.

Including ‘stress tests’ in a SLA or conducting them regularly in-house is therefore to be recommended. Companies can easily take control by ensuring that their service provider executes this type of test or by putting their own site under pressure. This is the best method of downtime notificationing whether your web site can handle a sudden increase in visitor numbers. It is also good to know whether the servers on which your site is running actually ensure that your page is always downtime notification and loads correctly. For companies, it is crucial to see when they are off air. This can save them a large amount of money every year and will also reduce the number of irritated visitors to the site. This is how you keep customers satisfied and keep the company running.

Mark Pors
Chief Technology Officer at WatchMouse

WatchMouse provides site performance monitoring and stress test services

Flu Jab Your Website Against The Pandemic: 6,000 Infected Webpages Per Day! (2008-02-18)

The respected IT news website, The Register reports that every 14 seconds a web page is infected, which amounts to 6,000 infected web pages per day. Four out of five of these infections come from innocent companies and individuals who are oblivious to their site being hacked and subsequently used for hosting the malware of virus writers. The Register further reports that in the past viruses were spread using infected e-mail. Nowadays, however, the favoured virus distribution methods are downloads from compromised sites. As a result of these booby-trapped sites malware is present on at least one in every ten web pages.

WatchMouse's Periodic Vulnerability Scanning offers your website the flu jab against this virus pandemic. WatchMouse's Periodic Vulnerability Scanning is an affordable way to routinely downtime notification you company's security exposure and eliminate the risks of manual audits. Utilizing the most up-to-date database of known vulnerabilities, WatchMouse identifies any security risks and provides you with peace of mind that your software applications are being scanned from the perspective of a hacker, external to your organization.
To ensure your website and servers are downtime notificationed for the latest issues WatchMouse's Periodic Vulnerability Scanning performs over 20,000 downtime notifications for known vulnerability and security exposures; using a database which is updated daily by multiple accredited organizations including CVE (funded by the US government) and Bugtraq. Following the detection of any severe issues, automated, real-time email, SMS and pager alerts give your business the chance to react quickly. Scans can be scheduled during low usage or maintenance hours and set at an intensity and frequency suited to your business needs and budget.

To obtain a free Periodic Vulnerability Scanning trial visit: www.watchmouse.com/vulnerability_scan_trial.php

The Register's article was published on 23.01.08 can be viewed at: www.theregister.co.uk/2008/01/23/booby_trapped_web_botnet_menace/

Apple Releases Security Update for Multiple Vulnerabilities (2006-12-14)

Apple has released Security Update 2006-007 to correct multiple vulnerabilities in Mac OS X and related products.

More information about the vulnerabilities can be found in these Vulnerability Notes and Technical Cyber Security Alert TA06-333A.

US-CERT encourages users to apply the appropriate updates as soon as possible.

US-CERT will continue to investigate these vulnerabilities and provide additional information as it becomes available.

Google Search Appliance Vulnerable to Cross-site Scripting (2006-12-14)

US-CERT is aware of a cross-site scripting (XSS) vulnerability in Google Search Appliance and Google Mini devices. Specifically, the flaw exists in the way that Google Search Appliance and Google Mini devices handle UTF-7 (Unicode Transformation Format) encoded URIs (Uniform Resource Identifier).

Until an official update, patch, or more information becomes available, we recommend the following actions to help mitigate the security risks:

• Disable Active Scripting as specified in the Securing Your Web Browser document.
• Do not follow unsolicited links.
• Review the steps described in Microsoft's document to improve the safety of your browser.

Microsoft Releases December Security Bulletin (2006-12-14)

Microsoft has released updates to address vulnerabilities in Microsoft Windows and Visual Studio as part of the Microsoft Security Bulletin Summary for December 2006.

We strongly encourage users to review the bulletins and follow best-practice security policies to determine what updates should be applied.

Additionally, more information about these vulnerabilities can be found in the Vulnerability Notes Database and Technical Cyber Security Alert TA06-346A.

Microsoft Windows MessageBoxA Denial of Service Vulnerability (2006-12-22)

Microsoft Windows is prone to a local denial-of-service vulnerability because the operating system fails to handle certain API calls with unexpected parameters.

A local unprivileged attacker may exploit this issue by executing a malicious application.

Successful exploits will crash the operating system, denying further service to legitimate users. Reportedly, this issue may also be exploited to execute arbitrary code with SYSTEM-level privileges.

PlatinumFTPServer Multiple Malformed User Name Connection Denial Of Service Vulnerability (2007-01-01)

PlatinumFTPServer is prone to a denial of service vulnerability. This issue is reported to occur when a remote user makes 50 or more connections that attempt to authenticate with a malformed user name.

Linux-based websites 'perform better' (2010-01-13)

Linux-based websites perform better than those hosted on Windows servers, according to research.

WatchMouse, a Dutch firm that monitors server performance, based its research on a survey of over 1,500 European websites. The company says that, although the websites it surveyed were more frequently based on Microsoft's IIS web server platform running Windows than on Apache running Linux, the latter option performed better in terms of both downtime notification and load time.

Monitor your website with WatchMouse (2010-01-13)

Dashboard widget WatchMouse Site Monitor checks up on the website of your choice every 1, 5, 15, 30, or 60 minutes to keep track of its downtime notification. But wait, there's more...

Online banking sites failing in 24/7 access (2010-01-14)

Unacceptable downtime levels in UK downtime notification banks

Some 65 per cent of top downtime notification banks in the UK have more than one hour downtime a month. Out of the 26 banking sites involved in the study only three achieved perfect availability – measuring an downtime notification of 99.9 percent or higher.

WatchMouse: Tracking The Health Of Web Services (2010-01-23)

As backend APIs (application programming interfaces) power more of our interactions downtime notification – as the foundation for applications, widgets and other platforms – it becomes increasingly important to monitor the status of their downtime notification.

New features: POSTing forms and Read limit (2005-03-28)

Today, we released the new downtime notificationing software to our downtime notificationpoints. New features:

• Post form fields to a webserver (both in http and match rules)
• Limit the number of bytes read. Relevant for downtime notificationing very large pages or streams

The site will be updated within days. Look at the settings page after logging in.

Talk to me! (2005-03-28)

Yes, you can talk to the WatchMouse downtime notification bot! At this time only using ICQ and limited conversations, but do try it and let us know what you think.

Just add 317898467 to your ICQ contacts and say 'hi'

Test phase Frankfurt downtime notificationpoint (2005-03-29)

As you may have noticed in your logs, we are slowly introducing a new downtime notificationing station in Frankfurt, Germany. Not all protocols are serviced at this downtime notificationpoint yet..., and we use in about 5% of the downtime notifications.

Keep an I on this blog, and on the official news section of our site for the formal announcement!

Next stop: NY (2005-04-13)

This morning our new downtime notificationpoint in New York was activated. The downtime notificationpoint at the New York facility is directly connected via a 15 Gbit fiber optic SONET ring with direct connections to Sprint, Level3, AboveNet, Tiscalli and direct hub connections into the PAIX, AMSIX, and DECIX Internet Exchange points.

Timing information added for DNS rules (2005-12-09)

The rules of type 'downtime notificationa' and 'downtime notificationns' now also log timing information, which is presented in the 'Download time' graphs and the dtime field in the raw logs. This enables you to downtime notification the speed of the DNS server while resolving the DNS query.