Public Status Pages revisited

WatchMouse introduced the Public Status Pages (PSP) feature a few months ago as a free additional feature to all professional plans.
Since the introduction many customers decided to use these status pages either for internal use, public facing, or as a fall back as soon as their websites are down.

You can read more on what it is, why you should use it and how to set it up on the Public Status Pages feature page.

New: HTML/CSS customization; give the PSP your organizations looks

The first version of the PSP allowed you to add your company logo and have your company name at the top of the PSP pages, but it still had fixed design and color use.

Today we introduce the ability to give the Public Status Pages the looks you want it to have. You can create your own HTML and CSS to build the Public Status Page the way you want it:

• Placement of your logo(s) anywhere.
• Use your house-style colors and fonts.
• Make it blend into the rest of your website.
• Provide addittional information/links relevant to visitors of your status page.
• Etc. etc.

New: Increased transparency; control how open you want to be

Different uses of the PSP ask for different levels of transparency of your public facing status page. With this new release you can control how much information you want to share

This new version allows you to add more performance and availability stats to your PSP:

• Availability charts of the last 24 hours and last seven days.
• Uptime percentage so far for the current day, for each service.
• Uptime percentage for past seven days, for each service.
• By default, solving issues changes all status icons in the history back to "green". You now have the option to show past issues in the history (status icons stay red/orange in the history).

And there is more...

On top of the major improvements above we also added the option to refresh data automatically at any desired interval. This can be useful when your PSP is used internally on a screen that is always visible in your NOC.

Finally we are happy to introduce the ability to add Google Analytics tracking code to your Public Status Pages, so you can track visitor use and behavior for this page.

Getting Started

All the new features can be found in the PSP setup screen, simply click on the "More settings" link to reveal them.

Custom HTML and CSS are not available in our console, but if you contact the helpdesk, we're more than happy to apply tour custom HTML/CSS to your Public Status Pages.

Today we release the Root Cause Analysis feature for all our website monitoring customers, at no additional cost, in all subscriptions.

What is Root Cause Analysis?

Until now, any issues found by WatchMouse were logged in your account and you were alerted according to your settings and preferences. Although the information in the alert tells you what the problem is, a more detailed analysis, or Root Cause Analysis, can be helpful in determining the actual cause of the issue.

How does it work?

When an issue is found and has been confirmed by another monitoring station (if needed), the Root Cause Analysis is triggered. Currently the Root Cause Analysis entails:

• Perform a traceroute from two monitoring stations to find the actual routes that were used in the tests.
• A screen dump (image) of the web page in question (for http(s) rules only) in two sizes
• The source HTML of the web page (for http(s) rules only) if available.
• Relevant checks: results from previous and subsequent checks for the same rule.
• A detailed analysis of your domain name set-up
• DNS analysis from two monitoring stations to see if the host names are resolved properly.

Getting started

If you had any errors reported recently there may already be Root Cause Analysis reports available in your account. To check it out go to the logs and select 'Root Cause Analyses' from the 'Display' menu and click [show].
If there are entries in the resulting list, simply click on the Root Cause Analysis icon to inspect the details.

When an alert email is sent, this will now contain a direct link to the Root Cause Analysis report.

We just launched WatchMouse Laboratories (labs.watchmouse.com)

This blog is the experimental outlet of the WatchMouse engineering team. Here we will share our thoughts on website monitoring, publish experimental features, hand out beta-invites and ask for your opinion.

Our first post is "Investigating IPv6 Website Monitoring", explaining about our work to be ready for the IPv6 Internet. As you might know IP addresses are running out, and many efforts are being made to replace the current Internet Protocol (IPv4) with version 6, which allows for an almost unlimited number of IP addresses.

Of course this will also have consequences on Website Monitoring of IPv6 enabled web sites and servers. WatchMouse is currently working to make this part of their standard offering, and some of our thoughts and findings are shared on our new labs blog.

Read more about IPv6 Website Monitoring on our labs site, and feel free to leave a comment!

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.

We have just released a completely revised version of the graphs in the WatchMouse console: the new charts!
The previous graphs are replaced by three different types of charts:

• Flash charts
• Google charts
• Static image charts

Apart from the major visual improvement, a lot of new charts and views were added, which provide a lot of useful information. I encourage you to have a look right now, and try all new chart types to familiarize yourself with the new views.

We have been testing the new charts for many weeks, but as with all new implementations there may still be a problem in a specific account or situation. So if you see something you weren't expecting, or want to suggest a new chart please let us know!

PS Just in case you miss the previous version, the 'old' graphs will still be available for a limited period of time. However, they are now only accessible via the direct link, no longer from the menu.