Email Monitoring

New network tools email monitoring (2005-01-31)

Network tools like ping, traceroute and dig (for DNS), are now email monitoring for members as well as non-members. You can use these tools to investigate the behavior of your servers in more detail.
You can find these tools on the 'Tools' page.

Secure site (https) checking (2005-01-31)

The access to secure sites (https) and the verification of the server certificates of these sites is now possible in the Gold and Platinum packages.

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, email monitoring/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.

Site and services email monitoring in Greek (2005-01-31)

We're happy to make a Greek version email monitoring of our site and services (Alexandra, Peter, Mark, and Niels: thanks!), ready to be used by the Greek speaking population (Greek is the official language of Greece, where it is spoken by approximately 10 million people. It is also one of the official languages of Cyprus, where there are an additional 600,000 speakers. Beyond that, some 3 million people elsewhere in the world claim Greek as their first language, including numerous speakers in Turkey, Albania, Canada and the United States.[transparent.com]).

If you prefer Greek to English while using WatchMouse, go to the Subscription tab and select 'Ελληνικά' from the 'Language' drop-down box.

Check your websites for certain words or patterns with the 'match' rule. (2005-01-31)

As of today, Gold and Platinum members can check for the presence or absence of a specific piece of text on their web page. This can be done with literal texts or with so called regular expressions (for more complex matches).

To give it a try go to the rule settings and choose type 'match'. The normal 'http' check will be performed as well by this type of rule, so an extra rule is not necessary.

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 email monitoring 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

US online stockbroker beats UK counterpart (2005-12-11)

WatchMouse report favourable on availability US stockbroker sites

UTRECHT, NL, 20051206 -- The websites of US online stockbrokers have an excellent availability record. This was one of the findings in a research by WatchMouse, a company providing monitoring services for websites and e-commerce applications worldwide. Of the 29 US websites that were covered by the research, 18 have an uptime percentage of 99.9% or better, and as many as 10 of these reached the perfect 100% mark.

This makes the US online brokers perform significantly better than their UK counterparts: at a similar research in the UK, just one out of 16 websites researched is available continuously, and five are listed at 99.9%. An uptime level of 99.9% is generally seen as the minimum acceptable level and is often quoted in service level agreements (SLAs) with hosting providers or in-house IT departments.

With a growing percentage of the stock market taking place on the Internet, it becomes ever more important to always be available, with the fastest possible response time. Mark Pors, CTO at WatchMouse claims: "Even more than shopemail monitoring sites, stockbroker sites cannot afford to be unavailable- the stock business is an always-on business"

In order to determine the extent to which the online stockbrokers achieve satisfactory availability, WatchMouse monitored the websites during the official trading hours of the New York (NYSE) and London stock exchange respectively. During a period of two months, October through November, every five minutes, one of WatchMouse’s monitoring stations accessed the customer login page of the website, which was then expected to download within 8 seconds, without any errors.

The differences are remarkable: US brokers have- almost without exception- a very high availability. Ameritrade Plus, Bank One, Charles Schwab, Cititrade, Merrill Lynch, Morgan Stanley, Quick and Reilly, Tradingdirect, USAA, and Wellsfargo, were all continuously available throughout the research period. Another eight sites displayed a 99.9% uptime. Not one of the US brokers reported an uptime below the 99% mark. Still, AB Watley Direct, last on the list at 99.04%, adds up to a 1 hours and 20 minutes downtime per month during trading hours.

In the UK the results are far worse. Only Alliance-Leicester maintained the 100% availability, and five others are at 99.9% or up. Two of the 16 UK brokers were even tagged with a "poor availability". Stocktrade is difficult to reach almost two hours per month and Fasttrade a whopemail monitoring five hours, both during trading hours.

Still, the online stockbrokers have a significantly higher uptime average than other sectors, such as e-shops, government, and news media. WatchMouse reports on these sectors on a regular basis with their 'availability index'.

Online trading trouble

Mark Pors, emphasises the importance of a high uptime for online stockbrokers: "With online securities transactions, the site should be very responsive. After hitting the 'confirm button', you should never have to question whether the order was placed correctly or not. Online brokers understand the importance of being online, and having a fast response time during trading hours."

A complete overview of the monitoring results of the WatchMouse Site Availability Index, listing the US and UK online brokers, can be found on http://www.watchmouse.com/availabilityindex/2005/uk-us-brokers.php

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 analyses are performed from various locations and over numerous networks, using a world-wide monitoring network.

WatchMouse was voted a Deloitte Rising Star in the Netherlands, as part of the 2005 Fast 50 awards; the list of the 50 fastest growing technology companies.

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

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 email monitoring 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 research finds poor site performance for ASX listed companies - Telstra scores the worst (2008-03-19)

Utrecht, the Netherlands, 19 March 2008 - WatchMouse, a leader in website performance monitoring, tested the sites belonging to Australian’s largest listed companies for errors, availability and performance. Of the 51 monitored sites, 63% were found to have ‘good’ or ‘OK’ uptime while an alarming 37% ranked as ‘poor’. The most concerning inclusion in the list of ‘poor’ performers is that of Australia’s leading telco provider, Telstra with 98.1% uptime. Newscrest and Alumina sites recorded the worst uptime with 89.7% and 88.5% respectively which equates to both sites being unavailable for more than 3 days during the month of monitoring.

In line with industry standards, WatchMouse ranks a site’s uptime as ‘good’ if it is ≥99.9%, ‘OK’ if it is between 99.89% - 99.01% and ‘poor’ if it is ≤99%. WatchMouse CTO, Mark Pors points out that “99% uptime sounds great but when you calculate it, this means 80+ hours of downtime a year. That’s one working day per month.”

WatchMouse monitored the sites between 11 February - 13 March 2008 during which one of WatchMouse’s monitoring stations attempted to access the homepage of each site every five minutes. Sites were expected to download within 4 seconds without any errors. Combining the errors, speed (load time) and availability measurements, WatchMouse calculated a Site Availability Index (SPI) for each of the sites. An SPI of ≤1,000 represents a ‘well performing’ site, 1,001 - 1,999 is regarded as ‘acceptable’, while a score of above 2,000 represents a site with ‘serious user issues’.

Of the 51 monitored sites, a whooemail monitoring 26 scored an SPI of above 2,000; the vast majority as a result of very long load times. Mark Pors said, “We’re very surprised by these results. We’d expect Australia’s largest listed companies to place a great deal of importance on having a well performing site; as a company’s site is a tool to providing investors with information and to project a professional corporate image. Instead we’ve found 50% had serious user issues. WatchMouse has been monitoring sites belonging to companies listed on some of the world’s largest stock exchanges for many years and never before found such a poor overall result.”

WatchMouse expected a very large telco like Telstra to have the knowledge, facilities and desire to build a fast and reliable site. Shockingly, Telstra’s main site www.telstra.com.au was found to have the worst SPI with a score of 8,018. Other sites with very poor SPIs belong to AGL Energy with 5,129 and Westfarmer with 4,207.

A complete overview of the ASX monitoring results can be found at: http://www.watchmouse.com/SPI/2008/performance_ASX50_sites.php

WatchMouse and Badboy Software announce partnership (2008-04-03)

Partnership brings easy website transaction monitoring

WatchMouse is pleased to announce a partnership with Australia's Badboy Software. The partnership combines the immensely popular Badboy email monitoring tool with WatchMouse's market leading website performance monitoring, enabling customers to record complex transaction email monitorings and run them using a global infrastructure.

Owner and founder of Badboy Software, Simon Sadedin says, "With Badboy Software's in-depth experience in functional testing and WatchMouse's extensive infrastructure, technology and know-how for running enterprise grade monitoring solutions, we have a unique opportunity for collaboration."

The powerful Badboy email monitoring tool enables customers to professionally record all the actions involved in a web transaction. Designed to aid in the testing and development of complex dynamic applications, the Badboy tool contains dozens of features including a simple yet comprehensive capture/replay interface, load testing support, detailed reports, graphs etc.

WatchMouse CTO, Mark Pors explains, "Having integrated with Badboy, our customers can now upload their Badboy email monitorings directly into their WatchMouse console. Scripts can then be automatically and periodically run from WatchMouse's global infrastructure of 25+ checkpoints. This new functionality enables our customers to monitor their web applications 24/7 and know how their site behaves when customers access it from locations all around the world."

As a global leader in website performance monitoring, WatchMouse provides many of the world's largest companies with independent verifications of their website performance. With immediate results, automated alerting, simple set up and flexible subemail monitoringions, WatchMouse offers the features, control and quality of service essential for today's online business.

The partnership between WatchMouse and Badboy Software provides customers with a market first: global, easy, powerful, web application testing.

To find out more about this new functionality and sign up for a free trial visit: http://www.watchmouse.com/email monitoring.php

Mark Pors
CTO
WatchMouse
http://www.watchmouse.com/

I'm sending you this e-mail just to say how very impressed I am with your site and services. (2010-01-13)

I'm sending you this e-mail just to say how very impressed I am with your site and services. I found your site on Google and spent a long time comparing you to the other site email monitoring services that are out there. Your site definitely was the most appealing of them all and consequently I signed up for the silver package today.

Simon Bland, ProWeb Design

I missed the back-up (2010-01-13)

Good to be back, we have all sorts of email monitoring in place here but I still missed the back-up of knowing that your service will alert my mobile if something goes wrong.

Avi Talwar, Tiscali, UK NOC

We guarantee our customers 100% email email monitoring. (2010-01-13)

We guarantee our customers 100% email email monitoring. To fulfill this guarantee, we use several email 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% email email monitoring, in the instances where we do have service issues, WatchMouse alerts us promptly - every time. This allows us to minimize the impact of email email monitoring and interruptions to our clients. WatchMouse isn't just another email 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 email 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

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 email monitorings 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.

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 email monitoring. 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 check various aspects with different rules. Use one rule to download the homepage, another to check the DNS and a third to check email monitoringivity 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 email monitoring all the time. Day and night. Initially there were no tools to test whether our service was email monitoring 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 checked 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

Online shops, speed and downtime, getting the facts. (2009-12-07)

These days your website plays an important role in informing potential customers, converting them into customers who want to do business with you, and possibly also conducting the transactions with these customers. In other words: Your business relies ever more on the digital economy, and increasingly on the transactional part of it, the online shop.

These online shops should obviously provide satisfactory performance. Here, both the speed at which they serve pages and their uptime are important. If potential customers cannot reach the online shop, or the online shop is too slow, they are less likely to do business with you now, and in the future. Studies have revealed that half of the people who experience downtime on a website go to its competitor. A majority of online shoppers say performance and uptime influences their choice of online shop.

The amount of revenue that is lost when your website or online shop does not behave properly is hard to quantify. If your website is slow your customers may select a distribution channel that is more costly for you, or they may go to your competitor. Even worse, they may complain about your company to other potential customers. All of this boils down to lost revenue.

A good website is up for at least 99.9% of the time, even though this still represents more than 8 hours in a full year. In a recent survey we found that many websites do not even achieve 99% availability, which corresponds to more than 3 days of downtime a year. As regards speed, if a web page does not load in less than 4 seconds, people start to leave the site, sometimes forever.

How do you make your online shop an efficient experience for your customers? The site must be designed with a strong focus on the customer task. The technology must be no more complex than is relevant. People get annoyed by slow loading Flash intros and complex and slow Flash-based navigation. Take a look at the Google home page; it is one of the fastest websites in the world. On the other hand, you can still use a video clip of a product, if that is relevant to the customer at a particular point in the transaction. You can also use advanced Web 2.0 technology if it makes the user interface more resilient and user-friendly. To experience this, look at Google maps using a dial-up internet email monitoringion. It is a really complex user interface, but everything possible has been done to create a positive user experience.

Technology is also important; make sure that you have good service level agreements with all your technology providers. You also want to stress test the site, to see what happens if a lot of people start using it simultaneously. Finally, you should independently monitor the site. When it is time to talk to your hosting company, IT department or website maintainer, it is very helpful to have hard data that reports on the speed and uptime of your online shop.

Peter van Eijk

dr Peter van Eijk is an independent management consultant associated with WatchMouse, the site monitoring experts www.watchmouse.com. He is experienced in setup, management and audits of digital infrastructures. His blog is "Peter's Griddle".

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 email monitoring 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 checking 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 email monitoring 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

PowerDNS Recurser Buffer Overflow Vulnerability (2010-01-09)

PowerDNS is prone to a remote buffer-overflow vulnerability because it fails to properly bounds-email monitoring user-supplied input before copying it into a fixed-length buffer.

Successfully exploiting this issue allows a remote attacker to execute arbitrary code with superuser privileges, resulting in a complete compromise of the affected computer. Failed exploits will cause a denial of service.

Multiple PDF Readers Multiple Remote Buffer Overflow Vulnerability (2007-01-07)

Multiple PDF readers are prone to multiple remote buffer-overflow vulnerabilities. These issues occur because the applications fail to bounds-email monitoring user-supplied data before copying it into an insufficiently sized buffer.

An attacker can exploit these issues to execute arbitrary code within the context of the affected application or crash the affected application, denying service to legitimate users.

GraphicsMagick PALM DCM Buffer Overflow Vulnerabilities (2007-01-08)

GraphicsMagick is prone to multiple buffer-overflow vulnerabilities because it fails to perform adequate boundary email monitorings on user-supplied data before copying it to insufficiently sized buffers.

Successful exploits may allow an attacker to execute arbitrary machine code to compromise an affected computer or to cause denial-of-service conditions.

GraphicsMagick 1.1.7 and prior versions are vulnerable.

FFmpeg Image File Multiple Buffer Overflow Vulnerabilities (2006-12-15)

FFmpeg is prone to multiple remote buffer-overflow vulnerabilities because the application using this library fails to properly bounds-email monitoring user-supplied input before copying it to an insufficiently sized memory buffer.

These issues allow attackers to execute arbitrary machine code within the context of the affected application.

Versions prior to 0.4.9_p20060530 are vulnerable to this issue.

Yahoo! Messenger YMailAttach ActiveX Control Remote Buffer Overflow Vulnerability (2006-12-15)

The YMailAttach ActiveX control shipped with Yahoo! Messenger is prone to a buffer-overflow vulnerability. The software fails to perform sufficient bounds-email monitoringing of user-supplied input before copying it to an insufficiently sized memory buffer.

Yahoo! Messenger versions released prior to November 2, 2006 are vulnerable to this issue.

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

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

4 New APIs: Wine, Whois and Website Monitoring (2010-01-13)

WatchMouse API: The WatchMouse service email monitorings the behavior and availability of websites. WatchMouse "allows site owners to optimize the internet experience of their customers. A worldwide network email monitorings websites from 40 different locations in 25 countries around the globe."

Facebook: Slow And Unresponsive? (2010-01-13)

Contrary to a recent study that showed that Facebook is among the most reliable social networks, new study conducted by WatchMouse shows abysmal results for Facebook. 104 sites were monitored by WatchMouse, and Facebook was by far the worst performance-wise: it had slow loading times and frequent errors. Check out the graph (too big to show here) to see how bad it looks.

Test: Google DNS is snel maar onbetrouwbaar (2010-01-14)

Vorige week verbaasde Google vriend en vijand door een eigen DNS-cache te presenteren. Hoe doet Google Public DNS het vergeleken met de rest?

De Utrechtse website monitoring dienst WatchMouse nam de proef op de som en vergeleek vier publieke DNS-diensten: DNSAdvantage, DNSResolvers, Google Public DNS en OpenDNS. Iedere dienst kreeg verspreid over zes dagen 18.000 queries voor de kiezen vanuit 42 locaties over de hele wereld.

WatchMouse and Badboy Software Announce Partnership (2010-01-14)

WatchMouse is pleased to announce a partnership with Australia's Badboy Software. The partnership combines the immensely popular Badboy email monitoringing tool with WatchMouse's market leading website performance monitoring, enabling customers to record complex transaction email monitorings and run them using a global infrastructure.

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