Monitoring Performance

New: scheduled maintenance, work schedules, performance indicators (2006-11-28)

1. Set-up maintenance periods per rule

   In the monitoring settings page, in "expert mode", you can now:

   • Start and duration of the maintenance period
   • Optionally set the repeat period (daily, weekly, monthly)

   During the maintenance period, WatchMouse will continue monitoring your servers but errors are not included in downtime calculation, and alerts are not sent. In the performance chart and logs, the checks while in maintenance are marked as such (see legend). The maintenance periods will be made visible in the graphs too.

2. User defined performance limits

   You can now define on a per-rule basis the limits for good, poor, and bad performance next to the existing ('timeout'). These limits can be entered in the monitoring settings page, in "expert mode". These limits are used in the performance chart.

3. Work schedule options in your contacts

   You can now specify which days, and which hours people in you contact list are on duty:

   • When not on duty, no alerts will be sent to this contact person
   • This is also useful for group alerts, with non-overlapping schedules
   • A contact can now also be set to 'inactive' manually, just like the monitoring rules
   • Inactive contacts do are not included when computing the maximum number of contacts you can still use

   You can set the work schedule in your contacts page, after selecting one of your existing contacts or entering a new contact.

New functionality: Site Performance Index graph (2007-08-17)

A new graph type has been added to the monitoring graphs: Site Performance Index.

The new graph is available for all WatchMouse users as of now, and can be found on the graphs page. Select "Site Performance Index" from the first drop-down menu (Display).

This graph shows the WatchMouse Site Performance Index (SPI) for the selected rule(s).
Note: Only rules of the type http and https are included in this graph.

The SPI graph enables you to compare the performance of your web servers. In order to make a fair comparison, the time-out for all rules should be the same.

The WatchMouse Site Performance Index (SPI) contains information on both the availability (or uptime) and the speed of a website. That makes the SPI an accurate representation of the average "waiting time" for a visitor: the higher the SPI, the longer visitors have to wait, on average, for the site to load. A low SPI is good, i.e. the shortest bar in this graph represents the site with the fastest response time and shortest waiting time.

The SPI values in the graph indicate only a relative SPI of your own web sites. If you want to compare your sites to those of your competitors use the WatchMouse SPI performance benchmarking.

New functionality: monitor your VoIP registrar (2007-09-24)

WatchMouse introduces a new service: SIP monitoring.

SIP, short for Session Initiation Protocol, is used for call set-up in Voice over IP (VoIP) calls, but is also used to convey the availability of VoIP devices and the presence of their users.

SIP monitoring is useful if you rely on Internet Telephony and want to keep an eye on the availability and performance of your VoIP provider: Your VoIP devices contact the registrar on a regular basis, and it is therefore crucial that this registrar is always available. The WatchMouse SIP rule allows you to monitor the registrar servers from each of the WatchMouse monitoring stations worldwide.

The new SIP monitoring feature is available for all WatchMouse customers with a monitoring subscription (Gold and higher), and can be configured on the Monitoring Settings page.

To get started:

• Get hold of the registrar's domain or proxy address and port (default 5060) (you can find this information in the settings of your VoIP devices, or ask your provider).
• Go to the rule Monitoring Settings page.
• Add a new rule, and select 'sip' from the type menu.
• Enter the SIP domain or proxy name, choose all other settings like you would for other rule types, save, and you're done!
• The results of the SIP monitoring appear in your logs, reports, and graphs instantly.

New Service: Monitoring the epicenter (DNS) of your online brands (2008-01-24)

Your domain name directs customers to a website where you represent your brand and all that it stands for but are you managing and regularly monitoring the domain name service (DNS) which translates your domain name and brings your customers to you? DNS consistency monitoring can help ensure your business does not lose customers to a slow or faulty DNS.

It is useless to have paid for an expensive and fully redundant web site server (park), if the DNS servers fail to respond, respond incorrectly, or inconsistently. Your DNS must be consistent and correct. Monitoring for DNS consistency is particularly important if you have online services relying on one or more domain names (and that is almost always the case). It doesn't matter if your DNS servers are maintained in-house or outsourced, you need to know if they are doing what they are supposed to do. WatchMouse's DNS consistency monitoring (now available in closed beta) checks your DNS systems and provides rapid notification of any unexpected DNS behaviour.

The WatchMouse's 'domain' type rule allows you to monitor the consistency of the behaviour of your DNS servers. It queries for a specified domain, performs a number of checks to test the health of your DNS servers and monitors for any difference in behaviour of your name servers. (If you also need to check that a domain name resolves to the correct IP address(es), you can use the 'dns' type rule which will be offered as part of the WatchMouse DNS consistency monitoring).

This new service will be available to all WatchMouse customers with a performance monitoring subscription (Webmaster and higher) and can be configured on the Monitoring Settings page. To set-up DNS consistency monitoring, simply enter the domain name (advanced settings are available).

Fancy participating in our closed beta test?

• Contact us to request participation in the beta.
• Collect all the domain names that are important to your business.
• Go to the Monitoring Settings page.
• Add a 'new rule' and select 'domain' from the type menu, for each of the domains you wish to monitor.
• Specify the other settings you would like for other rule types, hit 'save', and you're done!
• The results of the domain name monitoring appear in your logs, reports, and graphs instantly.

WatchMouse and Nedstat - Combining web site analytics and site performance (2008-06-02)

WatchMouse recently integrated with Nedstat's tool Sitestat. Nedstat is Europe's leading website analytics provider. Combining Nedstat's marketing intelligence with WatchMouse's website performance monitoring, enables customers to gain insight into the relationship between performance and visitor behavior.

The integration between WatchMouse and Nedstat should be of great benefit to WatchMouse customers who are using Sitestat Pro (or are considering using it) as it enables you to view your WatchMouse performance monitoring & Sitestat visitor statistics together. After making a few simple adjustments to your existing WatchMouse interface, you can view and compare both performance and visitor statistics, embedded in custom WatchMouse reports and thereby quickly spot any possible correlation between them e.g. an inverse relationship between your site's download time and your page views.

Having WatchMouse and Sitestat data presented in one custom report could help you identify when improvements to your site or infrastructure are needed, and as you implement improvements, you can track customer reaction and hopefully see a rapid return-on-investment with increased page views and online sales.

To find out how to integrate Sitestat data into your WatchMouse interface visit the Visitor statistics FAQs.

To view the brochure click here: Nedstat and WatchMouse partnership brings online marketing and technical performance data together [PDF file]

BadBoy Software updates scripting recorder to improve WatchMouse's Functional testing service (2009-01-07)

The WatchMouse Functional testing service allows you to define multi-step tests through a website and replay them periodically from the WatchMouse monitoring stations. This goes beyond just monitoring site performance and uptime, it allows you to verify that your web applications and back end systems really work.
More information on this service can be found on the Transaction Monitoring & Web Application Testing page.

In a co-operation with BadBoy software, who provide a tailored version of their recoder software which allows you to upload the resulting script directly into your WatchMouse dashboard.

Feedback from our "Functional testing" customers has lead to several essential improvements to the BadBoy recorder. This improved version has now been released and we recommend all our customers to upgrade to this version.
The new - WatchMouse specific - version can be downloaded here: http://www.badboy.com.au/versions/BadboyInstaller-2.0-latest_wm.exe

The most important changes are:

CHANGES IN BADBOY 2.0.7

   #1097: Multipart Forms Incorrectly export Parameters to JMeter Encoded causing Double Encoding

   #1087: Use Follow-Redirect Option in JMeter for More Reliable Export Playback

   #1086: Export Referer and Other Default Headers to JMeter

   #1085: Assertions placed as Children of Requests not Exported to JMeter

CHANGES IN BADBOY 2.0.6.1

   #1075: Security Update (MS08-052 - Critical)

The full release notes can be found here: http://badboy.com.au/versions/ReleaseNotes-2.0.7.txt

WatchMouse Public Status Pages: your own public website health page in two clicks! (2009-08-19)

Today we move the WatchMouse Public Status Pages (WMPSP) out of beta, making them available for all WatchMouse customers free of charge!

What is a Public Status Page?

A public status page is a web page that informs your customers on the status of your services, inspired by similar pages from many organisations like Amazon, Apple, Google, but also ISPs, financial institutions and other organisation who deliver critical services to other companies or the general public. Well-known examples are:

• The Amazon web services Health Dashboard
• Apple MobileMe support (top right corner)
• Google Apps Dashboard
• Nationwide (a UK bank) service page
• The WatchMouse Status Page and our Monitoring stations status (yes, we eat our own dog food)

On our Public Status Pages the current status of your selection of on-line services can be displayed, and updates (public announcements) can be placed there for your customers. The pages are hosted on the Amazon cloud infrastructure, ensuring that your status page is highly scalable. It also ensures that your status pages continue to be available even if your main site or service is not.

Should my organization have a Public Status Page?

There is a strong trend to inform customers as soon as possible when certain services become unavailable, and announce maintenance well in advance. If you would like to provide your customers a dedicated status page for the on-line services you provide to them, WMPSP is a very efficient and cost-effective solution for your organisation. You can have a Public Status Page set up in minutes by creating one or more rules in your WatchMouse account, set up a public folder, and move these rules into this folder. Using the WMPSP setting page you can post announcements, annotate current issues, and optionally set up a special host name (CNAME) so people can access the status page using your domain name, e.g. status.yourdomain.com.

How does it work?

After you have set up a public folder with monitoring rules in your account, the status of these rules will be pushed to http://status.watchmouse.com/NNN automatically (where NNN is a unique id for your status page). Make sure the settings of the rules, and especially the timers for the performance thresholds are according to your standards / SLA. You may want to have a similar set of rules with more strict thresholds for internal use so you will get notified well before your Public Status Page is update. Note that you can have your own host name as well, i.e.status.yourdomain.com instead of http://status.watchmouse.com/NNN

Whenever there is a performance or availability issue, you can annotate this in your WatchMouse account and this information (e.g. "our technicians are working on a solution, expected to be available at 16:00") will be pushed to the WMPSP as well. Similarly, you can announce maintenance or downtime in the same procedure and this will be listed in the announcement section of your Public Status Page.

All Public Status Page are hosted on the Amazon web services infrastructure, making it independent from your own servers availability and ensuring a very high availability and scalability.

Get started now!

• Login into your account and go to the standard rule settings page
• Create a new rule folder for each WMPSP you would like to set up, and create rules within those folder that are representative for the availability of your main services.
• Go to the WMPSP setting page and click the [add] button, and select a folder you created in the previous step.
• Optionally you can also add a host name within your own domain in the CNAME field. Not that you have to add a CNAME record to you DNS for this host name pointing to status.watchmouse.com.
• Click [make public] and you're done! Note that it might take a minute or two before the status page is actually available, since the data has to be transferred to the Amazon AWS platform first.
• Test your WMPSP by clicking on the Name and/or CNAME links in the public folder listing. Observe that each rule has it's own detail page which looks like this: WMPSP for the WatchMouse web site
• Note that the name and logo shown can be changed in your account details
• Next you can add announcements to your WMPSP in case you have scheduled maintenance for one of more services or when actual issues arise and you would like to update your customers about the progress fixing it.

WatchMouse releases new Site Performance Monitoring Widget for Apple users (download widget) (2006-10-22)

WatchMouse releases 2.0 widget for dashboard, aimed at Internet site performance monitoring.

NETHERLANDS, 2006-10-23. By means of the widget Apple users can get direct insight into the performance of their own Internet site. The widget can be downloaded for free from the Apple website.

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

The three founders of WatchMouse, Niels Eijsbroek, Stan van de Burgt and Mark Pors are enormous Mac-fans with a total of twenty Macs in their possession. The monitoring widget is quite unique: it is a combination of a desktop and a hosted application. When the widgets detects a problem with the site it is checking, it alerts the user with a 'beep', followed by the launch of a web browser, which is directed to a web application on watchmouse.com. There the site is checked from over 20 different locations worldwide.

Worldwide monitoring

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

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

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

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

About WatchMouse

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

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

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

WatchMouse provides independent worldwide monitoring of our sites (2010-01-13)

WatchMouse provides independent worldwide monitoring of our sites, supplementing our internal monitoring, to provide us frequently-updated metrics on availability and performance just as the user experiences. The WatchMouse service represents an exceptional value and time savings.

Jacob Moorman Director of Operations, SourceForge.net

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."

WatchMouse Monitors 26 Popular APIs So You Don’t Have To (2010-01-20)

Website monitoring startup WatchMouse is launching a new service dubbed API-status.com today, a website that displays realtime availability and performance of popular, public APIs.

The lists of monitored APIs consists of 26 of the most heavily trafficked Web services, including Google Search, Google Maps, Bing, Facebook, Twitter, SalesForce, YouTube, Amazon, eBay and others.

WatchMouse Monitors 26 Popular APIs So You Don't Have To (2010-01-23)

Website monitoring startup WatchMouse is launching a new service dubbed API-status.com today, a website that displays realtime availability and performance of popular, public APIs.