Network Performance Monitoring

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.

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.

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 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.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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