News
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:
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.
Press releases
Linux-based website beats Windows-based sites (2007-06-24)
WatchMouse research shows Linux/Apache has less downtime and yields faster websites than Microsoft/IIS
London, June 20, 2007 – Linux websites have better uptime and load faster than Windows-based websites. Research by WatchMouse, a website monitoring company, also shows that web server platform Apache outperforms the Microsoft IIS platform. Therefore, having a Linux website and an Apache webserver platform offers the best choice for professional web pages.
WatchMouse researched the performance of over 1500 websites across different economic sectors in Europe. Most websites in this study are based on either Linux or Windows. Linux offers the best uptime. When looking at web server platforms the overall opinion favours Microsoft IIS and Apache although the latter outperforms the former in this area as well. The research finds that apart from operating system and web server platform, uptime also depends on the country where the server is based.
On average, Windows and Linux are running more than three quarters of all websites. However, there are differences between countries. Poland and Germany favour Linux combined with Apache for their websites while the professional sites in the UK and Sweden rely heavily on Windows/ Microsoft IIS. When looking at the relative performance of the different web server platforms, Linux clearly beats Windows.
One in four of the monitored professional websites have an uptime of 99.9% which suffices for customer satisfaction. Two thirds of the websites have an availability of less than 99.9% which accounts for at least 8 hours downtime per year. According to WatchMouse this is not acceptable.
“Even though the companies in our study seem to prefer Windows over Linux, our research shows they would be better off using Linux/Apache based websites. Research has shown that most web users are very impatient and will wait no longer than four seconds for a webpage to load”, says Mark Pors, Chief Technology Officer at WatchMouse. “Companies need to realise that website uptime is crucial for a healthy customer satisfaction and a solid client base. Organisations need to become more aware of the impact the choice of web server platform can have on their overall availability and performance.”
A complete overview of the monitoring results of the WatchMouse Site Availability Index, listing all the sites monitored, can be found on
http://www.watchmouse.com/SPI/
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
European e-commerce sites poorly prepared for Christmas rush (2004-12-24)
Comparison with US "role models" Amazon and Barnes & Noble
THE NETHERLANDS, 20041223 -- Many European e-commerce sites have made only minimal preparations for the increased number of visitors in December. The congestion caused by Christmas meant that, on average, only one in six web sites was continuously available. This was the conclusion of WatchMouse, a Dutch monitoring service provider, following a survey of over 50 European e-commerce sites. Excessive interest from customers can overload the server or have dramatic effect on response times.
During the past month, WatchMouse – at its own initiative – closely monitored over 50 web sites where consumers can shop online. The survey shows that the availability varied from 98% to 99.6%. "This may seem high, but a score of 98% means that a site is not available for half an hour per day. This makes 14 hours a month, or a week a year", says Mark Pors, one of the founders of WatchMouse.
As a comparison to the US market, two "role models of e-commerce" - amazon.com and barnesandnoble.com - were monitored during the same period. Amazon`s performance was similar to that of the average European web shop, whereas Barns & Noble outperformed most e-commerce sites with an uptime of 100%.
The consequences of downtime are reflected not only in loss of income. Pors: "A website that is not available can cause stacks of work for your helpdesk and, at the end of the day, damage your brand. The problem is that many website owners are unaware that sites are responding poorly, or not responding at all. If they were aware of this, taking action to intervene is simplicity itself: for example, by adding extra server capacity."
WatchMouse has concluded from its survey that more than 70% of the web sites have not achieved optimum accessibility. Given the increasing trend in online purchases, gigantic sums are involved: Online sales will increase by 44% to €13 billion ($17 billion) in Western Europe over the holidays period, compared to €10 billion ($13 billion) in the US (Forrester Research, November 2004).
December is a top month for purchasing on the internet. Pors: "We see response times and the number of error reports increase dramatically in the days leading up to Christmas."
About WatchMouse
Companies can easily monitor their internet sites themselves, thanks to WatchMouse’s monitoring service.
WatchMouse has been monitoring internet sites and e-commerce applications for companies across the globe since 2001. WatchMouse has thousands of customers in more than 70 countries. WatchMouse services are available in seven languages, and analyses are carried out through the world-wide monitoring network from a range of locations and networks.
Columns
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.
