Site Monitor

WatchMouse offers 'white label' pages for resellers (2005-01-31)

WatchMouse resellers can now use the WatchMouse white label pages at no extra charge. These pages without WatchMouse branding can be used to integrate into your own website, in order to offer monitoring services to your customers. For more on the WatchMouse white label have a look at:

• WatchMouse Standard White-label User manual
• White label example site.

For more on the WatchMouse reseller program go to the reseller pages.

WatchMouse selected as "Best Product" - PC Magazine (2005-01-31)

In the November issue of the Dutch Personal Computer Magazine, WatchMouse was chosen "Best Product" in a comparison of site monitoring services.

WatchMouse widget 1.1 released (download widget) (2005-12-17)

WatchMouse releases version 1.1 of their Apple Dashboard site monitoring widget.

NETHERLANDS, 2005-12-16. By means of the WatchMouse widget Apple users get direct insight into the accessibility of their own Internet site. The widget can be downloaded for free from the Apple website.

At regular intervals the dashboard widget 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 stations.

Features

• Checks your website from your own computer every 1, 5, 15, 30, or 60 minutes (new in this release).
• Displays the uptime over the last 72 hours.
• Alerts you in case of an error and...
• Verifies errors from all the WatchMouse worldwide monitoring stations

The new version also fixes some minor bugs. The free WatchMouse site monitoring widget can be downloaded from the Apple website , and requires Mac OS X 10.4 (Tiger) or later.

http://www.apple.com/downloads/dashboard/networking_security/watchmousesitemonitor.html

Award-winning Web pioneer embarks on European partner drive (2009-05-14)

WatchMouse looks to boost sales of enterprise solutions through channel expansion

LONDEN, UK - WatchMouse, one of the fastest growing companies in the Netherlands, and winner of the Deloitte and Touche rising star award in 2005, is recruiting new value added resellers across Europe.

The company leads the market in subscription self-service website monitoring solutions, and is now expanding its offering with more complex monitoring solutions for large companies. It is looking for established partners with networking or internet security expertise to take both offerings to market.

Resellers that become a partner, will get margin on WatchMouse subscription fees, delivering recurring revenue. On top of that they can charge fees for additional services, such as configuration, maintenance, setup and consultancy. With the more complex solutions for the enterprise, resellers can also add value through the sale of service contracts.

WatchMouse offers a full support program to its resellers, which includes:

• Marketing material & documentation
• Training
• Second line support
• Leads, generated by its free trial service and marketing activities

"Until now, our self-service monitoring services have been predominantly sold directly by WatchMouse. As more and more large companies are turning to us for services, we need people on the ground that are close to these companies both physically and culturally," said Stan P. van de Burgt, CEO WatchMouse.

"The indirect channel is a prerequisite - especially for our new range of services, as these are typically sold person-to-person, so expertise is needed for both set-up and execution," he added.

New version of WatchMouse widget available (2006-10-03)

WatchMouse widget for Apple computers has been expanded: from local monitoring to worldwide monitoring.

The WatchMouse Site Monitoring Dashboard widget was already available for local monitoring, but the current version (2.0.4) can now also be linked to your WatchMouse account. The widget, which already checked one website every 1, 5, 15, 30 or 60 minutes from your own computer, can now also be used to display the checks of the websites in your account and the availability of these websites during the past 24 hours. In the event of a malfunction, a check is performed by all WatchMouse monitoring stations. The widget provides an immediate warning or a warning after 2 to 5 successive errors.

The expanded WatchMouse Site Monitoring widget can be downloaded free of charge from the WatchMouse website and can be installed within 1 minute. URL: http://www.watchmouse.com/widget/dashboard_widget.php

New web site monitoring station: Melbourne, Australia (2007-05-29)

The WatchMouse network of monitoring stations expands again, this time in Melbourne, a second web site monitoring station in Australia, bringing the total number of checkpoints to 21.

The new checkpoint will appear automatically in your logs. You can also set one of the new checkpoints as the primary checkpoint in your monitoring settings.

The current status of the WatchMouse web site monitoring network can be found on the 'About' tab of the WatchMouse site.

New web site monitoring station: Copenhagen, Denmark (2007-09-08)

The WatchMouse network of monitoring stations expands again, this time in Copenhagen, a another site monitoring station in Scandinavia, bringing the total number of checkpoints to 23.

The new checkpoint will appear automatically in your logs. You can also set one of the new checkpoints as the primary checkpoint in your monitoring settings.

The current status of the WatchMouse web site monitoring network can be found on the 'About' tab of the WatchMouse site.

New web site monitoring stations in Brazil and France (2007-12-16)

The WatchMouse network of web site monitoring stations expands again, this time in Porto Alegre, Brazil and Lille, France.

With a the new site monitoring station in Brazil, we expand our network to cover South-America, while the station in Lille brings additional coverage in France where there is already a station in Paris. The total number of checkpoints is now 26.

The new checkpoint will appear automatically in the customer dashboard logs. Customers can select the new stations as the primary checkpoint in the monitoring settings.

The current status of the WatchMouse web site monitoring network can be found on the 'About' tab of the WatchMouse site.

New Service: Monitoring the epicenter (DNS) of your online brands (2008-01-24)

Your domain name directs customers to a website where you represent your brand and all that it stands for but are you managing and regularly monitoring the domain name service (DNS) which translates your domain name and brings your customers to you? DNS consistency monitoring can help ensure your business does not lose customers to a slow or faulty DNS.

It is useless to have paid for an expensive and fully redundant web site server (park), if the DNS servers fail to respond, respond incorrectly, or inconsistently. Your DNS must be consistent and correct. Monitoring for DNS consistency is particularly important if you have online services relying on one or more domain names (and that is almost always the case). It doesn't matter if your DNS servers are maintained in-house or outsourced, you need to know if they are doing what they are supposed to do. WatchMouse's DNS consistency monitoring (now available in closed beta) checks your DNS systems and provides rapid notification of any unexpected DNS behaviour.

The WatchMouse's 'domain' type rule allows you to monitor the consistency of the behaviour of your DNS servers. It queries for a specified domain, performs a number of checks to test the health of your DNS servers and monitors for any difference in behaviour of your name servers. (If you also need to check that a domain name resolves to the correct IP address(es), you can use the 'dns' type rule which will be offered as part of the WatchMouse DNS consistency monitoring).

This new service will be available to all WatchMouse customers with a performance monitoring subscription (Webmaster and higher) and can be configured on the Monitoring Settings page. To set-up DNS consistency monitoring, simply enter the domain name (advanced settings are available).

Fancy participating in our closed beta test?

• Contact us to request participation in the beta.
• Collect all the domain names that are important to your business.
• Go to the Monitoring Settings page.
• Add a 'new rule' and select 'domain' from the type menu, for each of the domains you wish to monitor.
• Specify the other settings you would like for other rule types, hit 'save', and you're done!
• The results of the domain name monitoring appear in your logs, reports, and graphs instantly.

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]

XXXXXXX XXXXX (2009-12-07)

Fout ISDN legt deel NL websites paar uur lam Afgelopen nacht raakten een groot aantal Nederlandse websites onbereikbaar door een fout van SIDN (Stichting Domein Registratie Nederland). De websites functioneerden waarschijnlijk perfect, maar omdat bij de host namen niet meer het bijbehorende IP adres kon worden gevonden. De storing begon middernacht en werd pas na 6:40 vanochten opgelost. SIDN is volgens eigen zeggen verantwoordelijk voor het stabiel functioneren van het .nl-domein op het internet dat meer dan 2.9 miljoen domeinnamen telt. Mark Pors, CTO van WatchMouse: "We zagen het aantal niet-bereikbare websites vanacht behoorlijk toenemen. De sites waren, ook buiten Nederland, niet bereikbaar tussen twaalf en zes". WatchMouse monitored met 26 controlestations websites maar ook DNS servers, welke de domein- en host namen omzetten in IP adressen. Deze DNS servers zijn volgens Pors "vaak de Archilleshiel van het goed functioneren van een site, iets dat maar weinig bedrijven zich realiseren. Meestal ligt het probleem bij een provider. Dat een heel topdomein problemen heeft hebben we in West Europa en de VS nog niet meegemaakt". De site van SIDN gaf om 10:30 nog geen nadere informatie over de storing, maar op verschillende sites wordt het 'verkeerd terugzetten van een backup' als oorzaak aangewezen. Zie ook: Tweakers en ISPam.

New Monitoring Stations in USA, Switzerland, India, South Africa (2008-07-17)

The WatchMouse performance monitoring network expands with another four stations, this time in:

• Chicago, USA
• Zurich, Switzerland
• Mumbai, India
• Johannesburg, South Africa

The total number of checkpoints is now 30, and follows customer demand in these countries, as well as demands from companies operating sites that cater to a worldwide audience.

The new checkpoints will appear automatically in the customer dashboard logs when monitoring is performed from random locations. Customers can select the new stations as the primary checkpoint in the monitoring settings.

The current status of the WatchMouse web site monitoring network can be found on the 'About' tab of the WatchMouse site.

Improved coverage for text message alerts to US cell phones (2008-08-25)

The preferred alerting channel of most of our customers is text messaging (SMS) to their cell phone and we have been offering this option since its first day of operation, alerting webmasters when there is an issue with their web site, web application, or any other internet service we monitor.

The coverage and speed of this channel has always been high in Europe, Australia and most of Asia, but occasionally less so in the Americas. To ensure the highest reliability, we have contracts with five different SMS providers, offering redundant gateways to the mobile network.

Today we are happy to announce a highly improved gateway for the US market, which ensures fast delivery and a far broader coverage of mobile operators in North America.

We advise all our US customers to review their current contact settings and try out gateway "m2" for their mobile devices.

More information on setting up your mobile device

During setup of a mobile device, the optimum gateway is selected, either automatically, or by sending a test message via each of the gateways.
If a gateway does not accept the message, the next best gateway is selected, ensuring the best possible delivery in any case.

For an even more redundant setup, some of our customers choose to have different gateways for different devices in their account.
Please contact the helpdesk if you need assistance with any of the above features.

Note that you can keep an eye on the delivery of the alerts on the message log page, where you can follow messages up to the moment of delivery at the mobile device!

New release: many new features and improvements (2008-08-25)

The most recent release of our site and software brings not only many improvements, but also a number of interesting new features:

• You can now restrict the monitoring of your site to a selection of our monitoring stations.
  As we are adding ever more of these stations, this has become a recurring feature request.
  How: In the [expert mode] of your rule settings, select 'Checkpoint selection'. This allows you to choose the checkpoints that will execute this rule. In case of a 'Master' sequence rule, additional checkpoints will only be used for second opinion checks. Make sure you select at least three stations for redundancy purposes.
• New IMAP and POP3 checkers now support SSL and can send 'round trip' test messages.
  These test messages are checked in the next monitoring cycle thus implementing a full round-trip email verification functionality
  How: In your rule settings for IMAP and POP3 rules select "SSL encryption". Make sure you are in [expert mode], where there will be an email address field. When an email address is found in this field, we send a test email to it in each cycle, and check for its correct delivery in the next cycle.
• New DNS checkers with many more features.
  Test for A, CNAME, MX, NS, PTR, and AAAA records and test these on our local resolvers, on your listed name servers, or on specific DNS servers. The existing dnsa and dnsns type rule will be replaced soon by this new dns type rule. How: In the [expert mode] of your rule settings type the name or IP address to be tested, select the record type, and click look-up. Now select the DNS servers that should be queried, set the other options and click save.
• In many cases, the log viewer will now also show the DNS resolve times for each check. As we move forward, we will add this for all check types.
• The web site now offers a more flexible subscription model, allowing customers to mix and match a wider range of different rule types and intervals.
• The reseller console has undergone major improvements making it easier for resellers to manage their customers' accounts.

In addition, many improvements have been made and several smaller issues have been resolved, please refer to the change log for details.

All new features are available for current and new subscribers at no extra charge. And, as always: if you are missing a feature, please let us know! We will most likely add it in a future release.

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

New Monitoring Stations in Belgium, Ireland, Norway and Mexico (2009-04-26)

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.

Cloud Watching (2009-10-08)

One of our business partners, Peter van Eijk, has used the WatchMouse website monitoring network to measure a number of cloud providers. He has made some interesting observations. You will also love the presentation tool he used. Use any browser to watch it at http://prezi.com/39648. If you twitter you can also follow him @petersgriddle

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:

• The Amazon web services Health Dashboard
• Apple MobileMe support (top right corner)
• Google Apps Dashboard
• Nationwide (a UK bank) service page
• The WatchMouse Status Page and our Monitoring stations status (yes, we eat our own dog food)

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.

Launching WatchMouse Laboratories: the tech playground for website monitoring (2009-10-08)

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!

Monitor your transition to IPv6 with WatchMouse (2009-10-14)

You've heard it before, and it's being announced more frequently and louder: The number of available addresses on the Internet is running out, and we all should move to the new addressing scheme, IPv6, as soon as possible. The uptake has been rather slow in the past, but that seems to be changing now as companies, ISPs, and other organizations are taking their first steps on the road to the IPv6 world. For most of these companies, however, this is quite a big step, with many things to consider and many uncertainties.

External IPv6 monitoring

As of today, WatchMouse offers IPv6 monitoring for web sites and other external services of your company. The monitoring network will, just like visitors of your website that happen to be on an IPv6 connected network, connect to your site when an IPv6 record is available in the DNS of your domain.

Check your IPv6 connectivity right now? Just visit our Check Host tool or the Ping tool. And while you're at it, set up a rule in your account to monitor your site continuously from our world wide monitoring network.

Many changes

To fully enable IPv6 monitoring, we have upgraded several components of our infrastructure:

• Our worldwide monitoring infrastructure, including the monitoring software
• The backend systems, including our databases and the WatchMouse API (see a post on this on WatchMouse Labs).
• The configuration portal (settings), where you can now specify whether or not to monitor over IPv6, if possible.
• The free tools on our site: check host and ping.

By offering IPv6 standard in all packages (including the free package and the 30-day trial) and in the tools on our site, we hope to facilitate a smoother transition to IPv6 in your organization.

Is your company interested in IPv6? Then do keep an eye on our IPv6 posts on WatchMouse labs.

New feature included in all website monitoring subscriptions: Root Cause Analysis (2009-10-18)

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.

In your logs you will find this icon right next to the (confirmed) error pointing to the Root Cause Analysis report. Note that this icon will be present only for the first confirmed error in a straight sequence of errors. There is another icon that might appear indicating that the log file has additional information (e.g. for http(s), scripting, or dns/domain rules) that looks like this .

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.

Redesigned WatchMouse site and new product plans (2009-12-24)

We’re pleased to announce the redesign and launch of www.watchmouse.com. The new site is faster, more responsive and designed to be much more intuitive. Don't take our word for it though, try it yourself and let us know what you think!

The changes:

• Clean, task-oriented design
• Faster page loads
• Improved main console for a better overview of your monitors and better access to the monitoring details
• New "dashboards" featuring related, grouped information and tasks
• A new dashboard selector on every page after you log in, just below the search field

We’ve also introduced chat support. You can now chat directly on the site whenever the support team is online (normally 8 AM to 8 PM Central European Time or GMT+1).

Stay tuned for even more usability improvements and additional features coming up in Q1 of next year!

New Product Plans

You asked and we listened! We’ve received many requests for expanded plans, and also for a slimmed down plan for personal use. Additionally, the functional test (scripts) we introduced last year have become very popular, so we decided to add these tests in all professional packages.

The changes:

• We added functional tests to the Webmaster and Corporate plans, plus a one-minute monitor in the Corporate plan - all at the same price
• Two new professional plans have been added: the Enterprise Plan with 100 monitors (including 20 functional tests) and the Multi-Site Plan
• The Gold Plan that included 10-minute monitors only, has been discontinued, however current customers can still continue to use this package
• All Professional Plans now include complementary vulnerability scans to verify that your site and server is safe
• Lastly, we added the Personal Plan, a cost-effective plan for small sites, and we beefed up the free, Lite Plan so it now checks at 20-minute intervals

Full details can be found at: http://www.watchmouse.com/compare_plans.php

Take a look at the new WatchMouse website and give us your feedback. Bear in mind we’re still adding content and polishing the edges, but we'd be delighted to hear your thoughts and comments!

Happy holidays!

Stan P. van de Burgt

CEO

WatchMouse

P.S. You may find an occasional English word in the non-English sites. Please note that these will be replaced within the next few days.

"Want to know the performance of your website?" (2006-11-29)

- WatchMouse launches Site Monitor for PC users –

Netherlands, November 29, 2006 - WatchMouse launches its free WatchMouse Site Monitor for Windows. This application provides PC users insight into the availability of their website(s) at all times. The Site Monitor can be downloaded for free at the WatchMouse website. Installing it only takes a minute.

The Site Monitor checks your company's site or your personal website at fixed intervals (5, 15, 30 or 60 minutes) from your own pc. When an error is found, or after 2 to 5 consecutive errors, you are alerted and the error is verified by all WatchMouse monitoring stations. Also, the availability of the site in the last 72 hours is shown in a performance chart.

The Site Monitor can be combined with a free WatchMouse account. This gives you the following extra benefits:

• The application can show you the monitoring results of all websites included in the account
• The monitoring is not only done from your own PC, but also from more than 20 WatchMouse checkpoints worldwide
• The application shows performance charts for any period in the Site Monitor
• In case of an alert the WatchMouse site is launched for more details
• Monitoring continues even when the PC is without an internet connection

In exchange for these extra benefits WatchMouse asks you to place a small uptime banner on the sites that are monitored.

The WatchMouse Site Monitor for Windows can be downloaded for free at http://www.watchmouse.com/windows/site_monitor.php Installing it only takes a minute.

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 monitoring 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

WatchMouse provides independent worldwide monitoring of our sites (2010-01-13)

WatchMouse provides independent worldwide monitoring of our sites, supplementing our internal monitoring, to provide us frequently-updated metrics on availability and performance just as the user experiences. The WatchMouse service represents an exceptional value and time savings.

Jacob Moorman Director of Operations, SourceForge.net

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 checking 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

W3C CSS :visited Pseudo-Class Information Disclosure Vulnerability (2007-03-01)

Cascading Style Sheets are a series of specifications produced and published by the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C). They are intended to provide a standard for adding literal formatting and layout information to HTML documents. CSS-1 is partially implemented by most web browsers, including Netscape and Internet Explorer.

Features defined in the CSS specification include the :visited pseudo class, used to define styles used on links to previously visited pages, and the ability to include external references in style declarations. Used in conjunction, these features may lead to an information disclosure vulnerability.

An attacker must construct a malicious web page, and include a link to a known, third party web page. The attacker may then define a :visited style for this link, and includes a reference to an attacker controlled file within the style declaration. When the malicious page is loaded, the user's web browser will access the external reference only if it is required. The attacker may then monitor the access to this file, and determine if the user has visited the specified page.

The :visited style defintion may also change information which is available through the browser DOM, allowing client side scripting to detect the state of the link. The script may then take intelligent action, possibly modifying page content or layout.

This is not a normal vulnerability so much as the consequence of a variety of design decisions, including usability and efficiency of the web browser and the difficult question of what information is safe to disclose in the DOM.

Linksys WVC54GCA Wireless-G Multiple Cross Site Scripting Vulnerabilities (2009-04-28)

Linksys WVC54GCA Wireless-G Internet Home Monitoring Camera is prone to multiple cross-site scripting vulnerabilities because the software fails to sufficiently sanitize user-supplied data.

An attacker may leverage these issues to execute arbitrary script 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.

Linksys WVC54GCA Wireless-G Internet Home Monitoring Camera firmware 1.00R22 and 1.00R24 are affected; other versions may also be vulnerable.

Gumblar Malware Exploit Circulating (2009-05-19)

US-CERT is aware of public reports of a malware exploit circulating. This is a drive-by-download exploit with multiple stages and is being referred to as Gumblar. The first stage of this exploit attempts to compromise legitimate websites by injecting malicious code into them. Reports indicate that these website infections occur primarily through stolen FTP credentials but may also be compromised through poor configuration settings, vulnerable web applications, etc.  The second stage of this exploit occurs when users visit a website compromised by Gumblar. Users who visit these compromised websites and have not applied updates for known PDF and Flash Player vulnerabilities may become infected with malware. This malware may be used by attackers to monitor network traffic and obtain sensitive information, including FTP and login credentials, that can be used to conduct further exploits. Additionally, this malware may also redirect Google search results for the infected user.

US-CERT encourages users and administrators to apply software updates in a timely manner and use up-to-date antivirus software to help mitigate the risks.

US-CERT will provide additional information as it becomes available.

Montgomery County Animal Shelter Search Engine Poisoning Campaign (2009-09-24)

US-CERT is aware of public reports regarding a search engine result poisoning campaign affecting search results for the Montgomery County Animal Shelter. Users seeking details on rumors about the closure of a "Montgomery County Animal Shelter" may be led to click on illegitimate search results which attempt to download malicious code. The rumors are being spread via e-mail, forums, and social networking sites, usually taking the form of a plea for readers to contact the shelter and adopt animals prior to the shelter's closing.

US-CERT is monitoring the situation and will provide updates as they become available.

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 uptime. But wait, there's more...