In order to meet customer demand, WatchMouse is proud to announce the expansion of its global infrastructure with another eight monitoring stations being deployed over the past two months. The new stations are in: India, Israel, Japan, New Zealand, Russia, South Africa, Switzerland and the USA. WatchMouse now offers 25 monitoring stations in major European and North American cities, with a further 10 stations spread across Africa, the Middle East, South America and Oceania.

WatchMouse's extensive infrastructure provides the means to accurately monitor sites and web applications from the perspective of users based in different global locations. Such multi-point monitoring is imperative as site performance varies greatly depending on the location of the user (e.g. customers in the USA might quickly access a site, while for users in Germany, the same site has errors or a long load time). WatchMouse CTO, Mark Pors explains that "Even if your site works well from your headquarters, customers may still have trouble reaching it from different external locations. As a slow or faulty site can frustrate users, damage the reputation of a company and result in lost sales, it is essential to monitor from more than one point."

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!

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.

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.

Utrecht, the Netherlands, 19th June 2008 - WatchMouse, a leader in website performance monitoring, monitored the most popular sports sites, belonging to each of the Euro 2008 nations. Combining the errors, speed (load time) and availability measurements, WatchMouse calculated a Site Performance Index (SPI) for each of the sites, to reveal that the nations with the best sports sites are France, Spain and the Netherlands. Sports enthusiasts in Turkey may be disappointed by confirmation that their nation’s favorite sports site ranks as the worst, largely due to long load times.

WatchMouse’s monitoring stations tried to access the homepage of each nations' favorite sports site every five minutes. With no errors, 100% availability and a load time of less than 4 seconds, France's www.lequipe.fr ranked as the best sports site with an enviably low SPI of 203, while Spain's www.marca.com narrowly took second place over the Dutch www.vi.nl. Of the 16 monitored sites, only Turkey’s spor.ekolay.net and Austrian’s www.krone.at/sport were found to have 'serious user issues'.