Performance Monitoring Software

BadBoy Software updates scripting recorder to improve WatchMouse's Functional testing service (2009-01-07)

The WatchMouse Functional testing service allows you to define multi-step tests through a website and replay them periodically from the WatchMouse monitoring stations. This goes beyond just monitoring site performance and uptime, it allows you to verify that your web applications and back end systems really work.
More information on this service can be found on the Transaction Monitoring & Web Application Testing page.

In a co-operation with BadBoy software, who provide a tailored version of their recoder software which allows you to upload the resulting script directly into your WatchMouse dashboard.

Feedback from our "Functional testing" customers has lead to several essential improvements to the BadBoy recorder. This improved version has now been released and we recommend all our customers to upgrade to this version.
The new - WatchMouse specific - version can be downloaded here: http://www.badboy.com.au/versions/BadboyInstaller-2.0-latest_wm.exe

The most important changes are:

CHANGES IN BADBOY 2.0.7

   #1097: Multipart Forms Incorrectly export Parameters to JMeter Encoded causing Double Encoding

   #1087: Use Follow-Redirect Option in JMeter for More Reliable Export Playback

   #1086: Export Referer and Other Default Headers to JMeter

   #1085: Assertions placed as Children of Requests not Exported to JMeter

CHANGES IN BADBOY 2.0.6.1

   #1075: Security Update (MS08-052 - Critical)

The full release notes can be found here: http://badboy.com.au/versions/ReleaseNotes-2.0.7.txt

WatchMouse and Badboy Software announce partnership (2008-04-03)

Partnership brings easy website transaction monitoring

WatchMouse is pleased to announce a partnership with Australia's Badboy Software. The partnership combines the immensely popular Badboy scripting tool with WatchMouse's market leading website performance monitoring, enabling customers to record complex transaction scripts and run them using a global infrastructure.

Owner and founder of Badboy Software, Simon Sadedin says, "With Badboy Software's in-depth experience in functional testing and WatchMouse's extensive infrastructure, technology and know-how for running enterprise grade monitoring solutions, we have a unique opportunity for collaboration."

The powerful Badboy scripting tool enables customers to professionally record all the actions involved in a web transaction. Designed to aid in the testing and development of complex dynamic applications, the Badboy tool contains dozens of features including a simple yet comprehensive capture/replay interface, load testing support, detailed reports, graphs etc.

WatchMouse CTO, Mark Pors explains, "Having integrated with Badboy, our customers can now upload their Badboy scripts directly into their WatchMouse console. Scripts can then be automatically and periodically run from WatchMouse's global infrastructure of 25+ checkpoints. This new functionality enables our customers to monitor their web applications 24/7 and know how their site behaves when customers access it from locations all around the world."

As a global leader in website performance monitoring, WatchMouse provides many of the world's largest companies with independent verifications of their website performance. With immediate results, automated alerting, simple set up and flexible subscriptions, WatchMouse offers the features, control and quality of service essential for today's online business.

The partnership between WatchMouse and Badboy Software provides customers with a market first: global, easy, powerful, web application testing.

To find out more about this new functionality and sign up for a free trial visit: http://www.watchmouse.com/scripting.php

Mark Pors
CTO
WatchMouse
http://www.watchmouse.com/

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 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.

WatchMouse and Badboy Software Announce Partnership (2010-01-14)

WatchMouse is pleased to announce a partnership with Australia's Badboy Software. The partnership combines the immensely popular Badboy scripting tool with WatchMouse's market leading website performance monitoring, enabling customers to record complex transaction scripts and run them using a global infrastructure.