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]
Even website hosting companies have too little uptime (2007-02-05)
Leaseweb, Rackspace and WideXS score well
Utrecht, 5 February 2007 – Research carried out by WatchMouse, the Dutch site and server monitoring company, has revealed that many website hosting companies are not achieving optimum performance in terms of uptime. During the months November and December 2006, the company registered the average loading times and availability of the sites of eleven website hosting companies. Leaseweb, Rackspace and WideXS came out on top.
The three best-performing companies all had an average uptime of 99.99% or higher. A good score, says WatchMouse, although the company pointed out that, even when achieving this score, a site will still be unavailable for eight hours every year. The reasons for this downtime vary between sites, although problems with the name server (DNS) and excessive loading times dominate. The types of problem also differ from site to site, indicating that good choices – for example for DNS solutions – are essential.
Companies which scored 99.7% or less are at risk of losing clients annually owing to their site loading too slowly, or unavailability of the web page. Four of the eleven hosting companies scored below this limit and will therefore have to work on their availability. Nevertheless, the organisations tested generally performed better than the average bank website, for example.
"On the one hand, it is reassuring to see that website hosting companies recognise the importance of good availability. Nevertheless, there is room for improvement, particularly as it is precisely these companies that should be setting the pace", says Mark Pors, Chief Technology Officer at WatchMouse. "Customers looking for a web hosting company will not want to entrust the management of their site to a hosting company whose own site is unreliable. Optimum performance is therefore crucial, for these companies in particular."
The full results of the survey can be obtained from the WatchMouse site: www.watchmouse.com
WatchMouse Launches API-status.com (2010-01-20)
New Site Monitors and Measures Uptime of 26 Popular API and Cloud Services Websites; Report Reveals Amazon, Google and Yahoo Among the Best and Vimeo, foursquare and Yammer Among the Worst Performers
WatchMouse, a global industry leader in self-service website and application performance monitoring, announced the launch today of API-status.com, a new dedicated website for monitoring and measuring the real time availability and performance of the public APIs of 26 heavily trafficked, popular “cloud computing” mega web services including: Google Search, Google Maps, Bing, Facebook, Twitter, SalesForce, YouTube, Amazon, eBay, PayPal, Wikipedia and others.
API-status.com does a call and check for a valid result on each of the APIs, and if the result is wrong or is received after four seconds, it is noted as an error and unavailable. The percentage of availability or uptime is based on the number of errors reported; details on API-status.com include a seven-day history along with a 24-hour glance and performance indication by country.
"Nearly all websites nowadays include information from outside sources such as maps or social media feeds. It impacts millions of websites worldwide if these services and systems are slow or down and can invoke a global domino effect of breakages and slowness," states Mark Pors, CTO and co-founder of WatchMouse. "The four-second limit on the response time may seem strict, but it is actually a long time, especially when the (mash-up) sites need to do multiple API calls to present a complete page to the visitor."
According to a recent report produced by Forrester Research and Akamai, two seconds was revealed as the new threshold of acceptability for e-commerce web page response times.
30-Day Report Card and Methodology
WatchMouse monitored the availability of 26 API/cloud web services during the period of December 16, 2009 to January 16, 2010. The results found that Yammer API had the lowest availability with 96.06 percent uptime and Amazon, Google Maps, Google Search, last.fm, and Yahoo Maps with the highest availability with 100 percent uptime. In accordance with industry standards, availability of greater than or equal to 99.9 percent is regarded as "good" while anything below 99 percent is regarded as "poor" site uptime. The methodology for testing the sites includes one simple API call and check for a valid result. This typically means an authentication action for most APIs, including a login, followed by a search or listing action, plus a check of the expected result action. The expected result can immediately return as an error or if the expected result action is reported after four seconds, it is also logged as an error. These errors are used to create the percentage of availability or uptime for each of the sites. Each site is checked in real time using the WatchMouse Public Status Pages tool, which can be used to measure and report the availability of any public website. Companies use the tool, which is hosted on the Amazon platform to inform customers and report publicly on the status of their services.
Click here to read the full report of all 26 website services uptime or visit www.API-status.com for real time status and statistical data on each website.
About APIs
An application programming interface (API) is a set of data structures, protocols, routines and tools for accessing a web-based software application. The practice of publishing APIs allows web communities to create an open architecture for sharing content and data between communities and applications. Content that is created in one place can then be dynamically retreived, posted and/or updated in multiple locations on the Web.
About WatchMouse
Founded in 2002, WatchMouse is a global industry leader in self-service website and application performance monitoring. WatchMouse product tests the behavior and availability of websites, services and applications utilizing an infrastructure that includes 42 worldwide remote monitoring stations in 26 countries. Advanced remote monitoring helps eliminate website downtime, allows issues to be identified and resolved quickly and guarantees peace of mind that your website has been thoroughly and externally tested from the user’s perspective. WatchMouse’s web-based products are easily deployed and offer many features including: extensive reporting tools, root cause analysis, automated email and text/SMS alerts. WatchMouse supports Philips, ING, VeriSign and other leading global companies who depend on WatchMouse to provide independent confirmation of both in-house and suppliers’ website performance. WatchMouse is a privately held company headquartered in Utrecht, The Netherlands. Learn more at http://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.
