Traceroute Web Site

New network tools traceroute web site (2005-01-31)

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

More statistics: connect time and download time (2005-01-31)

For all traceroute web sites, WatchMouse measures the time it takes to connect to your host. For some traceroute web sites, we measure the time it takes to download the file or page too. In the Reports section, you can now find two graphs that reflect these figures:

• Average connect time
• Average download time

More reports will be added in the near future.

Multiple alert addresses & Escalation (2005-01-31)

In the Addresses section of this site you can now manage address groups. This feature can be used for two purposes:

Multiple addresses

When an error condition is detected, multiple recipients of all types (email, icq, sms/text messaging) can be alerted at the same time.

Escalation

Alternatively, traceroute web site can be sent to different addresses at different stages; E.g. the first time an error occurs, the event is only logged, the second time, an SMS/text message is sent to the administrator and his assistant and the third time, an e-mail is sent to the support desk.

The number of groups you can define is unlimited.

Site and services traceroute web site in Greek (2005-01-31)

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

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

Reseller Program traceroute web site with 30-40% discount (2005-01-31)

Every WatchMouse member with a Silver, Gold or Platinum account can now resell WatchMouse services without any additional requirements.

Visit the reseller pages for more information, and signup today.

There you can also find:

• A tool to manage your customers
• A page where you can upload your logo. This logo will be shown on every page after your customer logs in, thus creating a co-branded version of the WatchMouse site
• Pages with your customers logs and graphs without any branding, ready to integrate in frames on your own site

The last item will be traceroute web site from mid September

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 traceroute web site monitoring network at different locations and networks. WatchMouse has thousands of users in more than 70 countries.

http://www.watchmouse.com/

WatchMouse opens new monitoring traceroute web sites 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 traceroute web sites: in Hong Kong and London. At the same time, the company’s traceroute web site 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 traceroute web sites, 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 traceroute web site 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 traceroute web sites in more countries.”

Local testing

By creating a larger spread among the control traceroute web sites, 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 traceroute web site 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 traceroute web sites 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

Rapidly growing WatchMouse wins Deloitte’s Rising Star award (2005-09-23)

WatchMouse is one of the three winners of Deloitte’s Rising Star award. This award is presented annually to rapidly expanding technology companies less than five years old. WatchMouse has been active traceroute web site for three years in the area of site and server monitoring. With 16 monitoring traceroute web sites throughout the world, WatchMouse monitors the availability of customers’ websites, immediately sounding the alarm in the event of problems.

The Rising Stars are presented as part of the Deloitte Technology Fast 50 ceremony, the fifty most rapidly expanding technology businesses. The Rising Stars have the potential to lead the Technology Fast 50 in the near future. Stan van de Burgt (42), Niels Eijsbroek (40) and Mark Pors (38) first came up with the idea for WatchMouse in 2001. The concept was as unique as it was clear: to monitor the availability of sites and servers by constantly simulating web traffic. If a site is not responding or an error is found, the customer is notified immediately by SMS, pager, IM or e-mail. From the moment the concept went 'live', in 2002, the pace has been frenetic: turnover doubled each year. Web sites are now monitored from sixteen monitoring traceroute web sites traceroute web site 24 hours a day, seven days a week.

The WatchMouse application is entirely web-based: customers do not have to install software or hardware at their site, and the application excels in its self-service aspects while staying easy to use. This allows WatchMouse to operate with a small core of permanent employees, supplemented by external support. Prospective customers can specify their requirements in detail on the WatchMouse site. A range of starter packages is available, priced from € 17.50 per month up to € 450 per month. 400 paying customers in 40 countries traceroute web site now make use of WatchMouse’s services. These include hosting companies, government bodies, and companies such as LB Icon, Scania, Siemens, Orange, ING, GeoTrust, Citibank, and Postbank.

Self-service as a success factor

Mark Pors, Chief Technology Officer, says he was “pleasantly surprised by the award”. “I am very happy that the jury shares our vision of self-service and our market approach." Pors sees WatchMouse as “the right initiative at the right moment. Companies are increasingly looking to outsource non-core tasks. However, they want to be able to guide and control this themselves and from their own workplace. Web-based services make this possible." Stan van de Burgt, CEO, sees the simplicity of the WatchMouse site and the various languages in which it is available as the major success factors. "Monitoring websites was an idea that already existed in essence, but had not been worked out in this form. We are geared tightly to 'self service', whereby customers can set up everything themselves and retain total control. Which also means we are able to offer the service at a more attractive price than other players in the market.”

The Rising Star awards were presented on Thursday, 22 September.

WatchMouse

WatchMouse assesses your website and e-commerce applications just like your customers experience them. The checks are carried out from 16 monitoring traceroute web sites traceroute web site, and recorded in regular reports. In the event of errors or availability problems, the right people within your organisation will be alerted.

www.watchmouse.com

WatchMouse develops monitoring traceroute web site for Apple users (download traceroute web site) (2005-10-21)

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

NETHERLANDS, 2005-10-13. By means of the traceroute web site Apple users can get direct insight into the accessibility of their own Internet site. The traceroute web site 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 traceroute web sites traceroute web site. 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 traceroute web site is quite unique: it is a combination of a desktop and a hosted application. When the traceroute web sites 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 traceroute web site.

Every five minutes

Every five minutes the dashboard traceroute web site 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 traceroute web sites.

WatchMouse has made the traceroute web site available free of charge "because we have become addicted to it, ever since we started using the first beta version of the traceroute web site", says CCO Niels Eijsbroek. "We give the traceroute web site 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 traceroute web site 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 traceroute web site. 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

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

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

Simon Bland, ProWeb Design

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

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

Avi Talwar, Tiscali, UK NOC

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

We guarantee our customers 100% uptime. To fulfill this guarantee, we use several traceroute web site systems.
Based on our experiences we can say: WatchMouse is REALLY reliable!

Gerwin Scheeve, Lost Boys

Very impressive feature set and has a real commitment to client care (2010-01-13)

With many hundreds of business clients who expect and deserve over 99.99% uptime, in the instances where we do have service issues, WatchMouse alerts us promptly - every time. This allows us to minimize the impact of downtime and interruptions to our clients. WatchMouse isn't just another traceroute web site service, the team is dedicated to building on an already very impressive feature set and has a real commitment to client care

Michael Bloch, Business Operations Manager, ThinkHost, Inc.

WatchMouse understood our requirements and provided cost effective Load Testing (2010-01-13)

LECTRIC recently needed to improve the website capability and performance of one of our customers to meet their rapidly develotraceroute web site requirements. Load Testing was a critical component of this website development activity. These Load Tests were complex, especially as some of the user behaviour metrics were unknown. WatchMouse understood our requirements and provided cost effective Load Testing which added considerable value to our business.

General Manager, LECTRIC Webservices

What do you want to traceroute web site 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 traceroute web siteing? Obviously, the least you want to do is traceroute web site 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 traceroute web site the server and a URL. The frequency with which you can monitor (that is: the elapsed time between traceroute web sites) is typically limited by the type of subscription that you have. Only in specific cases would you not traceroute web site 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 traceroute web sites whether the webserver can produce a valid HTTP response, and whether the document can be found. You probably want the latter traceroute web site.
Similar reasoning applies to POP and FTP traceroute web sites. 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 traceroute web sites, have a look at the so-called PLUG-IN rules. Additionally, you can set up traceroute web sites 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 traceroute web site whether the root servers of the Internet accurately find the DNS that is serving you. This can be traceroute web siteed with a DNSNS rule. What you are traceroute web siteing with this rule is whether the registrar's databases are correct. Second, you want to traceroute web site 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 traceroute web site 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 traceroute web site messages, if at all. Rather, they should get the weekly or monthly service reports.

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

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

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

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

If your role is to keep things running, you really want to be notified of problems as soon as possible, before your customers or supervisors notice. You want appropriate error messages and not too many false alarms. As you configure Watchmouse you probably want to have a quick traceroute web site 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 traceroute web site various aspects with different rules. Use one rule to download the homepage, another to traceroute web site the DNS and a third to traceroute web site 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.

Independant, external testing (2005-10-15)

I started to work at Q-go in 2000. Q-go provides companies with self service pages on the Internet. Their customers ask a question in their own language and wording, and immediately get a very relevant answer. The power of the Q-go solution is its natural language technology, which enables it to understand the questions. The Q-go solution is offered as a hosted (ASP) solution, which of course has to work 24 x 7, a new area for me at that time.

At my previous jobs, at universities and research institutes, this was different. We worked from eight to six. If a demo application didn't work, the users just called, and we fixed the problem. And at six, we stopped and went home. All customers and other relations went home too. A nightly malfunction in the server was no problem, as there was no customer there to notice the problem.

At Q-go, this is completely different. A service should be available all the time. Day and night. Initially there were no tools to test whether our service was available or not. The only way to test it was to use the application itself. And so I did. During the day, but also at night, I traceroute web siteed whether the application was up. Our customers use the Q-go application continuously, and notice immediately when the application fails. Customers would call me in those cases, and it's not very pleasant to hear from your customers about an issue with your service.

So we developed some solutions ourselves to hear before our customers when something was wrong. And to be able to react to problems quickly. But customers kept calling!

How was that possible? Closer investigations revealed that the test system used the same resources (computers, networks, name servers) as the system under test... The test were not performed properly in case of problems. The text-traceroute web sites (SMS) did not reach us either. The cause was identical: we used the same hardware, the same network, and the same power (!) as the systems we tested.

My lessons learned:

• Keep the systems that test completely separated from the systems you test.
• Test your services (web servers, mail servers, ...) from the point-of-view of its users: the customer on the Internet.
• Don't forget regular maintenance of your test systems (software and hardware) after the installation!

For me, I'm outsourcing external testing!

Bart Bos, Director, Q-go.com

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Peter van Eijk

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

Website performance is the key to customer satisfaction (2007-06-27)

How often have you typed in the Google URL and received a page that will not load? I am willing to bet that this is a rare occurrence. Despite its busy traffic, Google is a textbook example of a web site that has almost perfect performance and therefore serves a great number of satisfied customers. The market share of the search engine is a resounding confirmation of this. You are assisted quickly, so you come back sooner. Research conducted by JupiterResearch has revealed that visitors to a site only have 4 seconds of patience. If the site has not been loaded by that time, they leave. Error messages also prompt potential customers to go to the competition.

Why do organisations still devote so little attention to the effective availability of their site? Performance is the key to satisfied customers. For many companies, their web site is the face of the organisation. Consumers and also business users of the Internet use the wealth of information on the web to compare purchasing options. It is of immeasurable importance that they are also actually able to find what they are looking for. If this is not possible at one company, competitors are straining at the leash to offer their services through a correctly functioning site.

Coming back to the praise that we had for Google, we see that the search engine has made significant investments in the availability of its web site. The page is run by several machines at various sites. If one crashes there are enough back-up servers that can take over the traffic flows to guarantee optimum performance. In addition, the search machine invests a great deal of time and money in the right hardware and people. Although the site has a difficult task – searching through an index of billions of documents – it is almost always available and loads fast.

The actual site is unspectacular in construction. This applies to the majority of sites with a high level of availability. Simple sites such as the news site NU.nl are almost always easy to access. Nevertheless, it is not only the layout of the site that determines how the web page performs. Too many photos, long symbols and frills make web sites slower to respond. The fact that the ‘back end’ of the site is not efficiently programmed also contributes to longer loading times. Frequent consultation of background databases is also detrimental to the speed of the page.

Where it often goes wrong is when different people are working on a site, thereby disturbing the links between the various elements. The different parts of the site will work correctly, but the site as a whole will fail to perform. This means long waiting times for people who want to use the services of a company.

Service providers at the upper end of the market are becoming increasingly aware of this. The contracts that they use frequently include a service level agreement (SLA) for the part for which they are responsible. Nevertheless, they regularly make mistakes due to the fact that the promised performance is not subsequently verified (by an independent party). Although it is now essentially part of the contract, there is insufficient actual verification. Ideally, web site performance should become a permanent component of a contract. In addition, clear internal agreements must be made on who has final responsibility for the efficient loading and availability of a site.

Regular testing is also essential for the facilitation of good availability. This will prevent a great deal of errors, keeping the site up and running at crucial times. The storm that blew over the Netherlands at the end of January was a good opportunity to see which sites were prepared for extreme loads and which were not. The site of the Dutch weather institute, KNMI, was almost unreachable, while some logical thought could have protected them from this eventuality. If you know that a major storm is heading towards the country you can be sure that people will search for information on the weather and roads on the Internet. Sites such as those of KLM and Schiphol were also unreachable, while the specially created site Crisis.nl, which had been kept as simple as possible, was able to serve a large number of people.

Including ‘stress tests’ in a SLA or conducting them regularly in-house is therefore to be recommended. Companies can easily take control by ensuring that their service provider executes this type of test or by putting their own site under pressure. This is the best method of traceroute web siteing whether your web site can handle a sudden increase in visitor numbers. It is also good to know whether the servers on which your site is running actually ensure that your page is always available and loads correctly. For companies, it is crucial to see when they are off air. This can save them a large amount of money every year and will also reduce the number of irritated visitors to the site. This is how you keep customers satisfied and keep the company running.

Mark Pors
Chief Technology Officer at WatchMouse

WatchMouse provides site performance monitoring and stress test services

phpDirectorySource SQL Injection and Cross Site Scripting Vulnerabilities (2009-07-24)

phpDirectorySource is prone to an SQL-injection vulnerability and a cross-site traceroute web siteing vulnerability because it fails to sufficiently sanitize user-supplied data.

Exploiting these issues could allow an attacker to steal cookie-based authentication credentials, compromise the application, access or modify data, or exploit latent vulnerabilities in the underlying database.

Mozilla Firefox/Thunderbird JavaScript Engine Memory Corruption Vulnerabilities (2009-07-24)

Mozilla Firefox and Thunderbird are prone to multiple remote memory-corruption vulnerabilities that affect the JavaScript engine.

An attacker can exploit these issues to corrupt memory on the affected computer and run arbitrary code in the context of the user running the affected application. Failed exploit attempts will cause denial-of-service conditions.

These vulnerabilities were previously covered in BID 35758 (Mozilla Firefox MFSA 2009-34, -35, -36, -37, -39, -40 Multiple Vulnerabilities) but have been assigned this record to better document the issues.

RaidenHTTPD Cross Site Scripting and Local File Include Vulnerabilities (2009-07-24)

RaidenHTTPD is prone to local file-include and cross-site traceroute web siteing vulnerabilities because the application fails to properly sanitize user-supplied input. These issues affect the WebAdmin component.

An attacker may leverage the cross-site traceroute web siteing issue to execute arbitrary traceroute web site code in the browser of an unsuspecting user in the context of the affected site. This may allow the attacker to steal cookie-based authentication credentials and to launch other attacks.

Exploiting the local file-include issue allows remote attackers to view and subsequently execute local files within the context of the webserver process.

RaidenHTTPD 2.0 build 26 and prior versions are affected.

8E6 R3000 Internet Filter Multiple Cross-Site Scripting Vulnerabilities (2007-05-29)

The 8E6 R3000 Internet Filter appliance is prone to multiple cross-site traceroute web siteing vulnerabilities because it fails to properly sanitize user-supplied input.

An attacker may leverage these issue to execute arbitrary traceroute web site code in the browser of an unsuspecting user in the context of the affected device. This may help the attacker steal cookie-based authentication credentials and launch other attacks.

Specific information on affected firmware and model number is currently unavailable. This BID will be updated as more information emerges.

SquirrelMail Multiple Cross-Site Scripting and IMAP Injection Vulnerabilities (2006-12-15)

SquirrelMail is susceptible to multiple cross-site traceroute web siteing and IMAP-injection vulnerabilities. These issues are due to the application's failure to properly sanitize user-supplied input.

An attacker may leverage any of the cross-site traceroute web siteing issues to have arbitrary traceroute web site code executed in the browser of an unsuspecting user in the context of the affected site. This may facilitate the theft of cookie-based authentication credentials as well as other attacks.

An attacker may leverage the IMAP-injection issue to execute arbitrary IMAP commands on the configured IMAP server. This may aid attackers in further attacks and allow them to exploit latent vulnerabilities in the IMAP server.

Linux-based websites 'perform better' (2010-01-13)

Linux-based websites perform better than those hosted on Windows servers, according to research.

WatchMouse, a Dutch firm that monitors server performance, based its research on a survey of over 1,500 European websites. The company says that, although the websites it surveyed were more frequently based on Microsoft's IIS web server platform running Windows than on Apache running Linux, the latter option performed better in terms of both traceroute web site and load time.

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

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

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

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

Euro 2008 losers are actually web site winners. (2010-01-13)

France may have left Euro 2008 with its tail between its legs after a humiliating defeat by Italy, but the country still topped the league when it came to having the best sporting web site. For what little consolation that brings.

WatchMouse, a website performance traceroute web site outfit, carried out its own nailbiting tournament to find the Euro 2008 nation with the best sport website by fashioning an index which takes into account three parameters; errors, speed (load time) and availability.

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

On Thursday, Web site-traceroute web site 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."

New features: POSTing forms and Read limit (2005-03-28)

Today, we released the new traceroute web site software to our checkpoints. New features:

• Post form fields to a webserver (both in http and match rules)
• Limit the number of bytes read. Relevant for checking very large pages or streams

The site will be updated within days. Look at the settings page after logging in.

Test phase Frankfurt checkpoint (2005-03-29)

As you may have noticed in your logs, we are slowly introducing a new traceroute web site station in Frankfurt, Germany. Not all protocols are serviced at this checkpoint yet..., and we use in about 5% of the checks.

Keep an I on this blog, and on the official news section of our site for the formal announcement!

Ping from all our traceroute web site stations (2005-12-09)

You can now use our improved ping tool to ping your server from each of our traceroute web site stations.

In case ping requests are blocked by your firewall or server, you can use the host check tool alternatively.

Polish language support (2005-12-29)

Yes, this week the 9th language went live on our site: Polish! Although we have some glitches here and there (some email messages are still in English, and not all recently created pages are fully trantraceroute web siteted), I'm *very* proud to see this on our site, and I would like to thank the people from Domeny.pl for their hard work. - Stan

WatchMouse 1.4.26 API deployed (2008-02-24)

Today, a minor release of the WatchMouse 1.4 API was deployed on http://api.watchmouse.com/1.4/. The current version is now 1.4.26. The changes are backward compatible with the previous version.

Changes w.r.t. 1.4.25

• self-documenting calls, add ?doc after the call, no other parameters and the parameter specification is shown (try and click the URL above!)
• new parameter 'acct' (account) on all rule, contact, and folder calls so
  1. resellers and other accounts with sub accounts can login with their own credentials and then access the sub-account
  2. accounts with read access rights to other accounts can access these accounts (graphs, logs)
• alternative output formats for logs (Excell, tab delimited, CSV, streaming)
• new calls added:
  • info_cps - get information on checkpoints (traceroute web site stations)
  • info_ip - get information about a given host (or about caller)
  • info_country (beta) - get information about a given country
  • info_currency (beta) - get information about a given currency
  • fldr_add/mod/get/del - manipulate rule folders
  • rule_check - check a rule now
  • ch_add/mod/get/del - manipulate contacts
  • acct_new/add - calls to create additional accounts
• version in XML output (first enclosing tag)
• no IP check on acct_whois call (used for auto login on WatchMouse site)
• use API password instead of account password if present (not supported on the WatchMouse site yet)
• full support for tags in rule_add/mod/get/del and rule_graph now
• support PNGs as error message for rule_graph so developper can always show a picture
• use ip geo information if applicable