Monitor Network

First checkpoint in China (2005-01-31)

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

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

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

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

New checkpoint: London UK (2005-01-31)

The WatchMouse network of monitoring stations has been extended once more, this time with a checkpoint at the well-connected datacenter of Rackspace in London, UK, bringing the total number of checkpoints 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 checkpoint will appear automatically in your logs. You can also set the new checkpoint as the primary checkpoint in your monitoring settings.

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

New checkpoints in Italy and Sweden (2005-06-27)

This week, two new checkpoints are added to WatchMouse's expanding monitoring network. In Italy, a monitoring station is operational in Cagliari, and in the next days, the Sweden station in Stockholm will be fully operational, bringing the total to 14 checkpoints.

New monitoring station: Santa Clara, California (2005-07-24)

The WatchMouse network of monitoring stations expands again, this time with a checkpoint in the heart of Silicon Valley, in Santa Clara, California, bringing the total number of checkpoints to 15.

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

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

New monitoring stations: Vancouver, Canada, and Madrid, Spain. (2005-08-31)

The WatchMouse network of monitoring stations expands again, this time with our first checkpoint in Canada, and one in Madrid Spain, bringing the total number of checkpoints to 16.

The new checkpoints will appear automatically in your logs. You can also set one of the new checkpoints as the primary checkpoint in your monitoring settings.

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

WatchMouse widget 1.1 released (download widget) (2005-12-17)

WatchMouse releases version 1.1 of their Apple Dashboard site monitoring widget.

NETHERLANDS, 2005-12-16. By means of the WatchMouse widget Apple users get direct insight into the accessibility of their own Internet site. The widget can be downloaded for free from the Apple website.

At regular intervals the dashboard widget checks one or more sites from the users own computer. Also, the availability of the site during the last 72 hours is registered. A problem is followed by an alert, which is then verified by all WatchMouse control stations.

Features

• Checks your website from your own computer every 1, 5, 15, 30, or 60 minutes (new in this release).
• Displays the uptime over the last 72 hours.
• Alerts you in case of an error and...
• Verifies errors from all the WatchMouse worldwide monitoring stations

The new version also fixes some minor bugs. The free WatchMouse site monitoring widget can be downloaded from the Apple website , and requires Mac OS X 10.4 (Tiger) or later.

http://www.apple.com/downloads/dashboard/networking_security/watchmousesitemonitor.html

Award-winning Web pioneer embarks on European partner drive (2009-05-14)

WatchMouse looks to boost sales of enterprise solutions through channel expansion

LONDEN, UK - WatchMouse, one of the fastest growing companies in the Netherlands, and winner of the Deloitte and Touche rising star award in 2005, is recruiting new value added resellers across Europe.

The company leads the market in subscription self-service website monitoring solutions, and is now expanding its offering with more complex monitoring solutions for large companies. It is looking for established partners with networking or internet security expertise to take both offerings to market.

Resellers that become a partner, will get margin on WatchMouse subscription fees, delivering recurring revenue. On top of that they can charge fees for additional services, such as configuration, maintenance, setup and consultancy. With the more complex solutions for the enterprise, resellers can also add value through the sale of service contracts.

WatchMouse offers a full support program to its resellers, which includes:

• Marketing material & documentation
• Training
• Second line support
• Leads, generated by its free trial service and marketing activities

"Until now, our self-service monitoring services have been predominantly sold directly by WatchMouse. As more and more large companies are turning to us for services, we need people on the ground that are close to these companies both physically and culturally," said Stan P. van de Burgt, CEO WatchMouse.

"The indirect channel is a prerequisite - especially for our new range of services, as these are typically sold person-to-person, so expertise is needed for both set-up and execution," he added.

New web site monitoring station: Melbourne, Australia (2007-05-29)

The WatchMouse network of monitoring stations expands again, this time in Melbourne, a second web site monitoring station in Australia, bringing the total number of checkpoints to 21.

The new checkpoint will appear automatically in your logs. You can also set one of the new checkpoints as the primary checkpoint in your monitoring settings.

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

New web site monitoring station: Copenhagen, Denmark (2007-09-08)

The WatchMouse network of monitoring stations expands again, this time in Copenhagen, a another site monitoring station in Scandinavia, bringing the total number of checkpoints to 23.

The new checkpoint will appear automatically in your logs. You can also set one of the new checkpoints as the primary checkpoint in your monitoring settings.

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

New web site monitoring stations in Brazil and France (2007-12-16)

The WatchMouse network of web site monitoring stations expands again, this time in Porto Alegre, Brazil and Lille, France.

With a the new site monitoring station in Brazil, we expand our network to cover South-America, while the station in Lille brings additional coverage in France where there is already a station in Paris. The total number of checkpoints is now 26.

The new checkpoint will appear automatically in the customer dashboard logs. Customers can select the new stations as the primary checkpoint in the monitoring settings.

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

New Monitoring Stations in USA, Switzerland, India, South Africa (2008-07-17)

The WatchMouse performance monitoring network expands with another four stations, this time in:

• Chicago, USA
• Zurich, Switzerland
• Mumbai, India
• Johannesburg, South Africa

The total number of checkpoints is now 30, and follows customer demand in these countries, as well as demands from companies operating sites that cater to a worldwide audience.

The new checkpoints will appear automatically in the customer dashboard logs when monitoring is performed from random locations. Customers can select the new stations as the primary checkpoint in the monitoring settings.

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

Improved coverage for text message alerts to US cell phones (2008-08-25)

The preferred alerting channel of most of our customers is text messaging (SMS) to their cell phone and we have been offering this option since its first day of operation, alerting webmasters when there is an issue with their web site, web application, or any other internet service we monitor.

The coverage and speed of this channel has always been high in Europe, Australia and most of Asia, but occasionally less so in the Americas. To ensure the highest reliability, we have contracts with five different SMS providers, offering redundant gateways to the mobile network.

Today we are happy to announce a highly improved gateway for the US market, which ensures fast delivery and a far broader coverage of mobile operators in North America.

We advise all our US customers to review their current contact settings and try out gateway "m2" for their mobile devices.

More information on setting up your mobile device

During setup of a mobile device, the optimum gateway is selected, either automatically, or by sending a test message via each of the gateways.
If a gateway does not accept the message, the next best gateway is selected, ensuring the best possible delivery in any case.

For an even more redundant setup, some of our customers choose to have different gateways for different devices in their account.
Please contact the helpdesk if you need assistance with any of the above features.

Note that you can keep an eye on the delivery of the alerts on the message log page, where you can follow messages up to the moment of delivery at the mobile device!

New Monitoring Stations in Belgium, Ireland, Norway and Mexico (2009-04-26)

The WatchMouse performance monitoring network expands with another four stations, this time in:

• Antwerp, Belgium
• Dublin, Ireland
• Oslo, Norway
• Guadalajara, Mexico

The total number of monitoring stations is now 39, and follows customer demand in these countries, as well as demands from companies operating sites that cater to a worldwide audience.

The new monitoring stations will appear automatically in the customer dashboard logs when monitoring is performed from random locations. Customers can select the new locations as the primary monitoring station in the monitoring settings.

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

Cloud Watching (2009-10-08)

One of our business partners, Peter van Eijk, has used the WatchMouse website monitoring network to measure a number of cloud providers. He has made some interesting observations. You will also love the presentation tool he used. Use any browser to watch it at http://prezi.com/39648. If you twitter you can also follow him @petersgriddle

Monitor your transition to IPv6 with WatchMouse (2009-10-14)

You've heard it before, and it's being announced more frequently and louder: The number of available addresses on the Internet is running out, and we all should move to the new addressing scheme, IPv6, as soon as possible. The uptake has been rather slow in the past, but that seems to be changing now as companies, ISPs, and other organizations are taking their first steps on the road to the IPv6 world. For most of these companies, however, this is quite a big step, with many things to consider and many uncertainties.

External IPv6 monitoring

As of today, WatchMouse offers IPv6 monitoring for web sites and other external services of your company. The monitoring network will, just like visitors of your website that happen to be on an IPv6 connected network, connect to your site when an IPv6 record is available in the DNS of your domain.

Check your IPv6 connectivity right now? Just visit our Check Host tool or the Ping tool. And while you're at it, set up a rule in your account to monitor your site continuously from our world wide monitoring network.

Many changes

To fully enable IPv6 monitoring, we have upgraded several components of our infrastructure:

• Our worldwide monitoring infrastructure, including the monitoring software
• The backend systems, including our databases and the WatchMouse API (see a post on this on WatchMouse Labs).
• The configuration portal (settings), where you can now specify whether or not to monitor over IPv6, if possible.
• The free tools on our site: check host and ping.

By offering IPv6 standard in all packages (including the free package and the 30-day trial) and in the tools on our site, we hope to facilitate a smoother transition to IPv6 in your organization.

Is your company interested in IPv6? Then do keep an eye on our IPv6 posts on WatchMouse labs.

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/

Dutch e-commerce sites poorly prepared for Christmas rush (2004-12-14)

Only 20% achieve maximum availability

UTRECHT, 20041205 -- Many Dutch e-commerce sites have made only minimal preparations for the increased number of visitors in December. The congestion caused by Sinterklaas [traditional Dutch celebration on 5 December] meant that, on average, only one in six sites was continuously available. This was the conclusion of WatchMouse, a Dutch monitoring site, following a survey of 25 e-commerce sites. Even worse figures are expected during the weeks before Christmas. 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 25 sites where consumers can shop online, such as Bol.com, Wehkamp, Free Record Shop, De Bijenkorf, ECI, Bart Smit, Dixons and Bruna. The survey shows that the 'up time' – the time during which the server is online – 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.

The consequences of this are reflected not only in loss of income. Pors: "A website that is not available can cause stacks of work for a helpdesk and, at the end of the day, damage the brand’s image. The problem is that many website owners are unaware that sites are responding poorly, or not 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 only 20% of the sites have achieved optimum accessibility. Given the increasing trend in online purchases, gigantic sums are involved. In the first six months of 2004, online expenditure rose to € 775 million; a 35% increase. Each online shopper spent € 227 from January through June of this year (Blauw Research, September 2004).

December is also a top month for purchasing on the internet. Pors: "We saw response times and the number of error reports increase dramatically in the days leading up to Sinterklaas. This does not bode well for the even busier period before Christmas."

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 users 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 opens new monitoring stations in China and London (2005-01-12)

Largest monitoring network world-wide.

UTRECHT, 20041210 -- WatchMouse, active in monitoring websites world-wide, has opened two new monitoring stations: in Hong Kong and London. At the same time, the company’s station in Sydney, Australia, has been completely renewed. With this expansion, WatchMouse is responding to the explosive growth in interest in real-time site monitoring from e-commerce companies. With nine stations, the Utrecht-based company is now the largest monitoring network world-wide.

Thanks to rapidly increasing online expenditure via the Internet, services such as WatchMouse are undergoing significant development. A monitoring station provides insight into the availability of e-commerce sites, the speed of these sites and response times. Research performed among Dutch websites by WatchMouse has demonstrated that many sites are still missing out in this area. Mark Pors, one of the founders of WatchMouse: “As spending online is growing by tens of percentage points each year, it is in the interest of sites to obtain insight into how they are functioning. A server that is poorly accessible for half an hour or more a day loses lots of money. Companies are increasingly recognising that they are losing out, both in terms of turnover and image. Not only in the Netherlands, but also elsewhere. For this reason, we are setting up stations in more countries.”

Local testing

By creating a larger spread among the control stations, sites can be monitored from more points throughout the world. WatchMouse is responding to increasing demand from clients for a world-wide picture of site availability. WatchMouse’s clients can also stipulate a preferred station for 'local' testing. For this reason, China and Great Britain have been added as two strategically important markets for e-commerce. The Utrecht company’s other stations operate from Florida, Texas, Sydney, Nuremberg, Orleans, Amsterdam and Singapore.

WatchMouse

WatchMouse has been monitoring internet sites and e-commerce applications for companies all over the world since 2001. WatchMouse has thousands of clients in more than 70 countries. The company’s services are available in seven languages, analyses are performed from a range of locations and networks via the world-wide monitoring network.

This press release in Simplified Chinese and Traditional Chinese

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 uptime 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 uptime of 99.995%. The site with the lowest availability is that of Wolters-Kluwer, with an uptime 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 uptime 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 uptime, 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 uptime 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 uptime 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 uptime 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 uptime 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.

WatchMouse develops monitoring widget for Apple users (download widget) (2005-10-21)

WatchMouse has developed a new widget for dashboard, aimed at Internet site monitoring.

NETHERLANDS, 2005-10-13. By means of the widget Apple users can get direct insight into the accessibility of their own Internet site. The widget can be downloaded for free from the Apple website. Last month, WatchMouse was voted a Deloitte Rising Star in the Netherlands, as part of the Fast 50 awards; the list of the 50 fastest growing technology companies.

In 2002, WatchMouse (www.watchmouse.com) introduced a new concept for Internet site monitoring. By means of ongoing simulations of Internet traffic the accessibility of sites and servers is checked. If a site is not responding, an alert message is sent immediately through SMS, telephone, Instant Messenger or e-mail. The sites are checked from sixteen monitoring stations worldwide. This is done 24 hours per day, seven days per week. The service is completely web based: customers don't have to install software, everything is 100% self-service, which keeps the costs low.

The three founders of WatchMouse, Niels Eijsbroek, Stan van de Burgt and Mark Pors are enormous Mac-fans with a total of fifteen Macs in their possession. The monitoring widget is quite unique: it is a combination of a desktop and a hosted application. When the widgets detects a problem with the site it is checking, it alerts the user with a 'beep', followed by the launch of a web browser, which is directed to a web application on watchmouse.com. There the site is checked from 16 different locations worldwide.

Every five minutes

Every five minutes the dashboard widget checks one or more sites from the users own computer. Also, the availability of the site during the last 72 hours is registered. A problem is followed by an alert, which is then verified by all WatchMouse control stations.

WatchMouse has made the widget available free of charge "because we have become addicted to it, ever since we started using the first beta version of the widget", says CCO Niels Eijsbroek. "We give the widget away for free mainly for the fun part. And of course it's also important to bring site monitoring to the attention of our fellow Apple-users."

The free WatchMouse site monitoring widget can be downloaded from the Apple website:

http://www.apple.com/downloads/dashboard/networking_security/watchmousesitemonitor.html

About WatchMouse

Companies can easily monitor their own Internet sites using WatchMouse's monitoring service. WatchMouse has been monitoring Internet sites and e-commerce applications for companies throughout the world since 2002. WatchMouse has thousands of customers in more than 70 countries. The services supplied by WatchMouse are available in eight languages, and analysis are performed from various locations and over numerous networks, using a world-wide monitoring network.

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

Minitel Beats the Internet When it Comes to Availability (2005-10-27)

UTRECHT The Netherlands, October 24, 2005 -- Minitel, the eighties precursor to the Internet, is more reliable than most of the top French Internet sites. This is the conclusion from a research by WatchMouse, a monitoring service company for Internet sites worldwide. For two months WatchMouse monitored twenty sites which offer similar information to their Minitel-equivalent, and found that not one of these sites is 100% available.

According to WatchMouse, Minitel still has a future. Many organisations which offer services both through Minitel and the Internet, cannot deliver 100% website availability. Of the twenty sites which were monitored, only three had an 'uptime' of 99.9% which is considered as the 'minimum acceptable'. This percentage is frequently used in service level agreements (SLA's) by host providers. The best performing websites were verif.fr (3617 VERIF) with 99.99%, socgen.com (3615 SG) with an uptime of 99.95%, and alapage.com with 99.92%.

At the bottom of the ranking were anpe.fr (ANPE 3614) with 98.18% and bnpnet.bnp.fr, (BNP 3614) with 97.99%. This makes the BNP site the worst performer, by being unavailable or performing poorly for almost 15 hours per month. For the full list see http://www.watchmouse.com/pr/watchmouse_minitel.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.

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.

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

Spanish websites suffer from poor performance (2005-12-04)

WatchMouse research shows that 71% of IBEX websites availability is below industry standards

MADRID, 20051121 - Of the top 35 funds listed on the Bolsa de Madrid (IBEX), 25 have websites with poor to dramatically poor availability. Many of the sites are badly accessible or unavailable for more than an hour per month.

The worst site, that of Antena 3 TV, is even unavailable for an equivalent of more than 8 days per month.

This was the conclusion drawn from the first Spanish Site Availability Index created by WatchMouse, a company supplying monitoring services for websites and e-commerce applications worldwide. In order to determine the extent to which the sites of IBEX funds achieve a satisfactory uptime, WatchMouse monitored the sites continuously between October 23 and November 11, 2005. Every five minutes, one of WatchMouse’s test stations tried to access the homepage of the site, which was expected to download within 8 seconds, without any errors.

An uptime of 99.9% is seen as the minimum acceptable level. This percentage is also often quoted in service level agreements (SLAs) with hosting providers. There were only five sites which achieved perfect 100% availability - Sogecable, Arcelor, FCC, BSCH and Altadis. The availability of the three worst performers was less than 95%; Acerinox (94.66%), Gamesa (86.54%) and Antena 3 TV with 73.05%.

Mark Pors, chief technology officer at WatchMouse, stated that he was "very surprised" by the results. "With several sites, we found an uptime that was worse than that of many smaller companies. This is worrying as IBEX funds in particular should give a great deal of priority to their corporate image. Maximum uptime should be part of the overall 'brand performance'."

Pors suspects that for some sites, the popularity could be a reason for poor availability. "Some of the sites belonging to IBEX funds will get a lot of traffic. However, this is no excuse; if we look at large online brokers in the US, for example, all achieve an uptime in excess of 99.9%."

A complete overview of the monitoring results of the WatchMouse Site Availability Index, listing the 35 sites, can be found on http://www.watchmouse.com/en/availabilityindex/2005/IBEX.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 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

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.

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 shopping 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 whopping 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

Spanish e-tailers not ready for Xmas shopping rush (2005-12-09)

WatchMouse research reveals weaknesses of Spanish online shops

Not a single Spanish webshop has an uptime of 100%, and only one out of 10 meets the regular industry availability standards. This is the conclusion of a research by WatchMouse, one of the fastest growing companies in the Netherlands, and winner of the Deloite Rising Star award in 2005.

WatchMouse has been monitoring the main ten Spanish webshops for 38 days, to find out if they are going to be able to handle the Christmas rush. The results of the WatchMouse Availability Index for Spanish e-tailers are poor. "We predict a long wait for internet customers this Christmas season, as Spanish e-shops don't seem to be ready to handle the increased traffic. In a fairly quiet period the performance has already been below standard. The extra volume of online shoppers before Christmas will definitely cause problems, and may even bring some sites down completely", says Mark Pors, CTO WatchMouse.

"According to recent research by the Asociación Española de Comercio Electrónico, retail e-trade in Spain reached some 1.8 billion euros in 2004. So there are big amounts at stake here. If customers cannot get through on a website, or are experiencing a long wait, they often decide to visit a competitive site, causing webshops to lose deals, and even risk losing loyal customers for good."

WatchMouse monitored the top ten Spanish e-tailers continuously from October 25 until December 2. Every 5 minutes, one of WatchMouse’s test stations tried to access the homepage of the site, which is expected to download within 8 seconds, without any errors. An uptime of 99.9% is seen as the minimum acceptable level. This percentage is also often quoted in service level agreements (SLAs) with hosting providers.

Of the ten websites monitored, there was only one meeting this requirement: Carrefour. Mercadona and AreaPC were the sites with the worst availability, showing a respective downtime of an equivalent of 10 and 16 hours over the 38-day testing period. In comparison: the main US e-tailers, such as eBay and Amazon all have 100% uptime, which shows perfect availability can be achieved.

A complete overview of the monitoring results of the 10 sites can be found on http://www.watchmouse.com/availabilityindex/2005/eshops-es.php
WatchMouse will continue to monitor the performance of the ten Spanish etailers over the Christmas period and will publish its findings in January 2006.

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.

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

Spanish banks closed for online business (2006-02-14)

WatchMouse research reveals most Spanish Internet banks struggle to offer reliable access to customers

Madrid, January 10, 2006 - Only one out of 31 Spanish banks offering Internet banking, has a login page available 100% of the time. Added to this, only 5 of the Internet banks' login pages monitored meets the regular industry availability standards.

This is the conclusion of a research by WatchMouse, one of the fastest growing companies in the Netherlands, and winner of the Deloitte Rising Star award in 2005. The company has been monitoring the Internet banking portals of the main Spanish banks for 2 months, and has found them to be well below acceptable service standards.

"One of the primary aims of Internet banking is 24 hour, 365 day access to account information. Sadly, Spanish customers are finding that this is far from the case. One bank's online banking portal login page was even unavailable 11 percent of the time - which inevitably means poor service for its clients", says Mark Pors, CTO at WatchMouse. "Customers of this bank have no guarantee they will be able to access their money when they need to make an urgent transfer."

Of the 31 banks whose sites were monitored, only BBVA's login page was 100% available. An uptime of 99.9% is seen as the minimum acceptable level, but 80% of the banks were unable to offer that.

Caja Cantabria has the worst performing online banking portal, showing downtime equivalent to more than 3 days over the 2-month testing period (11 percent of the time). Banco Urquijo was second worst, with a total downtime of more than one day over the testing period.

As a comparison: the main US brokers, such as Morgan Stanley, Cititrade and Wellsfargo all have 100% uptime, which provides a benchmark for availability in the financial world.

WatchMouse monitored the 31 Spanish banks' websites continuously from November 6, 2005 until January 5, 2006. Every 5 minutes, one of WatchMouse's test stations tried to access the login pages of the bank's Internet banking portals, which are expected to load within 8 seconds, without any errors.

Besides the Internet banking portals, WatchMouse also checked the availability of the home page of each Internet bank, plus 19 other banks that don't offer Internet banking. Of these 50 homepages in total, none had a homepage with 100% availability and only 11 of the 50 are meeting industry standards.

A complete overview of results can be found on http://www.watchmouse.com/availabilityindex/2006/banks-es.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.

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

Lazio tops Serie A internet league - Chievo Verona relegated to Web also-rans - (2006-02-07)

UTRECHT, February 7, 2006 - Lazio, AC Milan, Treviso and Empoli FC lead the way in Serie A performance - on the web, rather than the pitch.

WatchMouse, a monitoring service that checks the availability of websites worldwide, spent two months following the twenty clubs in Serie A. If a site is not available or there is no response within eight seconds, this is classified as downtime. The results of the research make worrying reading for some of the world's 'super clubs'.

Only two Serie A teams achieved a 'satisfactory' score - namely more than 99.9% accessibility (or 0.1% downtime), which is seen as the minimum. The 'real' leader of the pack, Juventus, was back in eighth place.

Chievo Verona finds itself adrift in last place. In other words, fans of that club can assume that the club's site will be unavailable for a total of three days a month. In fact their supporters may be better advised to look for another team: with a score of 89.89%, the present number six in the 'real' table, performs not much better than the site of the trattoria round the corner.

The results were not encouraging for Serie A fans. Only Lazio and AC Milan made the 'Champions League' of availability, with scores which exceeded the 99.9% benchmark.

"Of course, scores of 99% look encouraging, concludes Mark Pors, WatchMouse's chief technology officer. "However the internet is an increasingly important communications channel for football clubs. Teams playing at the top level have a supporter base spread across the world, and the Internet is the primary channel for reaching them. Fans wanting to look something up on the internet expect a site to be continuously available. If it's not, they could take their affiliation and custom elsewhere."

Pors is surprised that clubs in Serie A, many of which have a considerable reputation, have not got their house in order on the internet. "For most of the sites, we are seeing an uptime that is poorer than that of many very small companies. Now, more than ever, football is big business with billions of customers. Clubs which fail to understand this will be unable to compete financially or on the pitch in years to come."

A complete overview of results can be found on http://www.watchmouse.com/availabilityindex/2006/serie-a-it.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.

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 alerts the user with a 'beep', followed by the launch of a web browser, which is directed to a web application on watchmouse.com. There the site is checked from over 20 different locations worldwide.

Worldwide monitoring

The new version (2.0.4) brings continuous performance monitoring, even when the Mac is not connected to the Internet, by connecting the widget to a WatchMouse account (free or paid). In October 2005, WatchMouse released the first version of this widget, which was downloaded over 10.000 times.

WatchMouse has made the widget available free of charge "because we have become addicted to it, ever since we started using the first beta version of the widget", says creative director Niels Eijsbroek. "We give the widget away for free mainly for the fun part. And of course it's also important to bring site performance monitoring to the attention of our fellow Apple-users."

The free WatchMouse site monitoring widget can be downloaded from the Apple website:

http://www.apple.com/downloads/dashboard/networking_security/watchmousesitemonitor.html

About WatchMouse

Companies can easily monitor their own Internet sites using WatchMouse's monitoring service. WatchMouse has been monitoring Internet sites and e-commerce applications for companies throughout the world since 2002. WatchMouse has thousands of customers in more than 70 countries. The services supplied by WatchMouse are available in nine languages, and analysis are performed from various locations and over numerous networks, using a world-wide monitoring network.

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

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

Social networking sites slow and inaccessible (2008-01-10)

WatchMouse research shows Facebook performance poorest of all

The Netherlands, January 10, 2008 – Popular social networking sites fail to deliver to their users, according to WatchMouse. Research from the leading website monitoring company has shown that web 2.0 sites often are slow to open or fail to load properly. WatchMouse monitored the time it took the social networking sites, listed on Wikipedia (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_social_networking_websites), to load. The results showed that the worst for availability is the immensely popular Facebook.

Other well known culprits include Twitter, last.fm, Windows Live Spaces, Friendster and del.icio.us. Of the 104 sites monitored, 51 show a Site Performance Index (SPI) of 1000 or more, making them very slow in load time. A remarkable outcome, seeing as most sites heavily use Ajax, which should lead to quicker load times since the dynamics of the site do not load immediately. Using Ajax should help websites increase interactivity, speed, functionality and usability by exchanging small amounts of data with the server so the entire webpage does not need loading fully every time someone performs an action on a page.

Of the monitored social networking sites, Faceparty performed the best - with an SPI of 303 - meaning users can access the site most frequently and in the fastest time. Looking at the results, most sites still have a lot to work on if they want their users to keep returning to their site. Research has shown that most web users are very impatient and will wait no longer than four seconds for a webpage to load.

“It is interesting to see that popular networking sites turn out to have very bad performance,” said Mark Pors, CTO at Watchmouse. “It is surprising they still have such a big fan base when they serve their users so badly. Using Ajax technology, they should be able to work more effectively. For now the sites will need to do a lot of work to remain popular and improve their performance.”

A complete overview of the monitoring results of the WatchMouse Site Availability Index, listing all the sites monitored, can be found on http://www.watchmouse.com/SPI/2008/performance_social_networking_sites.php

WatchMouse finds poor site performance for many CAC40 listed companies - Surprisingly, Air France-KLM and France Telecom amongst the worst (2008-05-23)

Utrecht, the Netherlands, 20 May 2008 - WatchMouse, a leader in website performance monitoring, tested the sites belonging to France’s CAC40 listed companies for errors, availability and performance. Five of the 40 monitored sites were found to have ‘serious user issues’. These sites belong to L’Oreal, France Telecom, Air France-KLM, Lagardere and Danone. Air France-KLM, Lagardere and Danone's sites were also found to have an uptime score, well below the accepted industry standards.

During the two month monitoring period, one of WatchMouse’s monitoring stations tried to access the homepage of the sites 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 Performance 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’.

The poor SPI results of L’Oreal and France Telecom’s sites were due to very long load times while Air France-KLM, Lagardere and Donone’s sites were all found to have a significant number of errors, in-addition to very long load times.

WatchMouse CTO, Mark Pors said, “As a telecommunications company, we’d expect France Telecom to have all the knowledge, facilities and desire to build a fast and reliable site. We’re therefore very surprised that this research found the France Telecom site operating well below industry standards.”

WatchMouse also reports on site uptime. In line with industry standards, WatchMouse ranks a site’s uptime as ‘good’ if it is ≥99.9%, ‘OK’ if it between 99.89% - 99.01% and ‘poor’ if it is ≤99%. 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.”

Of the CAC40 monitored sites, those with poor uptime results belong to: Air Liquide, Carrefour, Schneider Electric, Veolia Environnement, Danone, Air France-KLM and Lagardere. Lagardere’s site scored 89% uptime meaning it was unavailable for more than three days during the period of monitoring.

A complete overview of the CAC40 monitoring results can be found at: http://www.watchmouse.com/SPI/2008/performance_CAC40_sites.php

About WatchMouse

Companies can easily monitor the performance of their web sites using WatchMouse's monitoring service. WatchMouse has thousands of customers in over 70 countries and checks from 25+ locations and networks worldwide (see www.watchmouse.com).

Contact: Mark Pors, mark@watchmouse.com +31302522400

WatchMouse finds poor site performance for some SMI listed companies - Richemont & Zurich Financial found to be the worst. (2008-05-23)

Utrecht, the Netherlands, 20 May 2008 - WatchMouse, a leader in website performance monitoring, tested the sites belonging to Switzerland’s SMI listed companies for errors, availability and performance. Three of the 20 monitored sites were found to have ‘serious user issues’. These sites belong to Baloise, Zurich Financial and Richemont. Zurich Financial and Richemont’s sites were also amongst six SMI sites found to have an uptime well below the accepted industry standard.

During the two month monitoring period, one of WatchMouse’s monitoring stations tried to access the homepage of the sites 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’.

The poor SPI results of Richemont and Baloise sites were largely due to very long load times while the SPI result of Zurich Financial’s site was due to both long load times and a considerable number of errors.

Mark Pors said, “I would have anticipated Switzerland’s largest luxury goods and financial services companies to strive to provide their customers and investors with a fast, error free sites as an important channel through which they promote their products, services and build brand awareness. I am therefore, very surprised that this research found these major companies’ sites operating well below accepted industry standards.”

WatchMouse also reports on site uptime. In line with industry standards, WatchMouse ranks a site’s uptime as ‘good’ if it is ≥99.9%, ‘OK’ if it 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.”

Of the 20 monitored SIM sites, those with the worst uptime results belong to: Nobel Biocare, Richemont, Zurich Financial, Nestle, Adecco and Synthes. Synthes’s site scored 95% meaning it was unavailable for more than a day during monitoring.

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

About WatchMouse

Companies can easily monitor the performance of their web sites using WatchMouse's monitoring service. WatchMouse has thousands of customers in over 70 countries and checks from 25+ locations and networks worldwide (see www.watchmouse.com).

Contact: Mark Pors, mark@watchmouse.com +31302522400

Ranking of EURO 2008 nations' sports sites - France the online winner! (2008-06-23)

Utrecht, the Netherlands, 19th June 2008 - WatchMouse, a leader in website performance monitoring, monitored the most popular sports sites, belonging to each of the Euro 2008 nations. Combining the errors, speed (load time) and availability measurements, WatchMouse calculated a Site Performance Index (SPI) for each of the sites, to reveal that the nations with the best sports sites are France, Spain and the Netherlands. Sports enthusiasts in Turkey may be disappointed by confirmation that their nation’s favorite sports site ranks as the worst, largely due to long load times.

WatchMouse’s monitoring stations tried to access the homepage of each nations' favorite sports site every five minutes. With no errors, 100% availability and a load time of less than 4 seconds, France's www.lequipe.fr ranked as the best sports site with an enviably low SPI of 203, while Spain's www.marca.com narrowly took second place over the Dutch www.vi.nl. Of the 16 monitored sites, only Turkey’s spor.ekolay.net and Austrian’s www.krone.at/sport were found to have 'serious user issues'.

WatchMouse CTO, Mark Pors said, “We're very pleased to find that many of the Euro 2008 nations have sports sites that function really well. We hope that as we continue monitoring, we'll see Turkey's national sports site improve as dramatically as their game did on Sunday!"

    Euro 2008 Sport Sites League Table:

    Rank              Country Site                              SPI

    1. France          http://www.lequipe.fr                    203

    2. Spain           http://www.marca.com                     478

    3. Netherlands     http://www.vi.nl                         488

    4. Croatia         http://sportskenovosti.hr                653

    5. Germany         http://www.sportbild.de                  657

    6. Italy           http://www.gazzetta.it                   767

    7. Switzerland     http://www.blink.ch/sport                785

    8. Czech Republic  http://www.sportovninoviny.cz            838

    9. Greece          http://www.sport24.gr                   1000

    10. Sweden         http://www.aftonbladet.se/sportbladet   1051

    11. Poland         http://www.sport.pl                     1169

    12. Russia         http://www.russiatoday.ru/sports        1275

    13. Portugal       http://www.abola.pt                     1214

    14. Romania        http://www.gsp.ro                       1486

    15. Austria        http://www.krone.at/sport               2041

    16. Turkey         http://spor.ekolay.net                  2796

Since monitoring started on 11 June 2008, one of WatchMouse’s monitoring stations has tried to access the homepage of each of the 16 sites, every five minutes. Sites are expected to download within 4 seconds without any errors. Combining the errors, speed (load time) and availability measurements, WatchMouse calculated a SPI for each of the sites. An SPI of less than 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’.

A complete overview of the Euro2008 monitoring results can be found at: http://www.watchmouse.com/SPI/2008/performance_EURO08_sites.php

About WatchMouse

Companies can easily monitor the performance of their web sites using WatchMouse's monitoring service. WatchMouse has thousands of customers in over 70 countries and checks from 25+ locations and networks worldwide (see www.watchmouse.com/)

Contact: Mark Pors, mark@watchmouse.com, +31302522400

WatchMouse expands Website Monitoring Infrastructure to 35 Global Monitoring Stations (2008-09-01)

In order to meet customer demand, WatchMouse is proud to announce the expansion of its global infrastructure with another eight monitoring stations being deployed over the past two months. The new stations are in: India, Israel, Japan, New Zealand, Russia, South Africa, Switzerland and the USA. WatchMouse now offers 25 monitoring stations in major European and North American cities, with a further 10 stations spread across Africa, the Middle East, South America and Oceania.

WatchMouse's extensive infrastructure provides the means to accurately monitor sites and web applications from the perspective of users based in different global locations. Such multi-point monitoring is imperative as site performance varies greatly depending on the location of the user (e.g. customers in the USA might quickly access a site, while for users in Germany, the same site has errors or a long load time). WatchMouse CTO, Mark Pors explains that "Even if your site works well from your headquarters, customers may still have trouble reaching it from different external locations. As a slow or faulty site can frustrate users, damage the reputation of a company and result in lost sales, it is essential to monitor from more than one point."

As the vast majority of businesses are aware of the need for global performance monitoring, WatchMouse was surprised to find global performance issues on the sites of some major international organizations, including the social networking site Facebook. In recent research WatchMouse found that facebook.com performs well in the USA but showed serious user issues from many other locations.

WatchMouse’s market leading infrastructure can help international organizations identify performance issues. Equally, WatchMouse supports clients who require performance monitoring within a particular region by allowing monitoring to be restricted to a sub-set of monitoring stations. This feature is useful for companies that only trade within a large country (e.g. USA) or region (e.g. Europe) but still require comprehensive monitoring within their area of operation.

About WatchMouse

WatchMouse provides global performance monitoring to thousands of customers in over 70 countries. In addition to a market leading infrastructure, WatchMouse offers automated alerting and an advanced user interface for complete self-management of all monitoring features and subscription details.

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.

Ethereal SOCKS Dissector Format String Vulnerability (2009-07-12)

A format string vulnerability has been reported in some versions of the SOCKS dissector for Ethereal.

An attacker can exploit this vulnerability by connecting to a vulnerable SOCKS server and sending malicious format string specifiers to the SOCKS server. If Ethereal is being used as a security tool to monitor network packets, it is possible that sensitive memory may be corrupted.

This has been confirmed to result in a denial of service condition. Additionally, it may be possible to cause Ethereal to execute malicious attacker-supplied code.

Gumblar Malware Exploit Circulating (2009-05-19)

US-CERT is aware of public reports of a malware exploit circulating. This is a drive-by-download exploit with multiple stages and is being referred to as Gumblar. The first stage of this exploit attempts to compromise legitimate websites by injecting malicious code into them. Reports indicate that these website infections occur primarily through stolen FTP credentials but may also be compromised through poor configuration settings, vulnerable web applications, etc.  The second stage of this exploit occurs when users visit a website compromised by Gumblar. Users who visit these compromised websites and have not applied updates for known PDF and Flash Player vulnerabilities may become infected with malware. This malware may be used by attackers to monitor network traffic and obtain sensitive information, including FTP and login credentials, that can be used to conduct further exploits. Additionally, this malware may also redirect Google search results for the infected user.

US-CERT encourages users and administrators to apply software updates in a timely manner and use up-to-date antivirus software to help mitigate the risks.

US-CERT will provide additional information as it becomes available.

Facebook tops one list of 'slow and inaccessible' social networks (2010-01-13)

On Thursday, Web site-monitoring firm WatchMouse released the results of a study about the performance of 104 social-media sites--social networks, blogging communities, bookmarking sites, and the like--and boldly deemed them to be overall "slow and inaccessible."