Along with our recent iPhone client release, we have also included a couple of enhancements to our downtime reporting feature. Just thought of discussing these in greater detail for the benefit of our readers.
Mark Downtime as Maintenance - Exclude maintenance from Downtime Calculation
Lets just say you had taken your websites offline for some maintenance purpose. You most probably don't want to receive alerts for this scheduled downtime and you will not want this downtime to be reflected in your reports as well. In such a scenario, you can use the "mark downtime as maintenance" option and mark this downtime as maintenance in Site24x7. This will not be considered for downtime calculation and will be displayed separately in the availability chart.
Zdnetasia recently reported that Indian government has announced plans to introduce digital passports to its citizens from 2010 onwards. We decided to take a closer look at what digital passports are and how they are implemented around the world.
What is a digital passport?
A digital passport, also called biometric passport or e-passport is the same as the traditional passport with the addition of a small integrated circuit or chip embedded in the back cover. The passport contains a microchip which contains the same information as on the picture page and a biometric photograph in addition to a machine readable zone. The chip is based on the "WORM" technology which stands for "Write Once, Read Many". These passports are designed to be harder to forge and to identify the bearer more securely.
The e-passport has been implemented in around 70 countries in the world. Most European union countries had introduced e-passports around the 2004-05 time frame. In the UK, the digital passport has been issued since February 2006.
Controversies
It has not been smooth sailing for digital passports from their inception. They've had their share of controversies too. There have been some protests in the past about the privacy of the bearer. Activists in many countries have questioned the lack of information about what exactly the passport's chips will contain. When the e-passport was introduced in the United States, there was criticism against the usage of RFID in the chips. Privacy activists were claiming that the signals from the chip were not encrypted and can be easily intercepted, thus jeopardizing the privacy of the bearer. Just a few days ago, human rights campaigners in Netherlands were up in arms against the government policy of storing fingerprints taken from passports on to national database.
In spite of all the opposition, more and more governments are keen on issuing digital passports to their citizens. This is because it has the potential to bring down passport forgery thereby improving the security aspect as well as it is easier to maintain than traditional passports. So the coming years should see most European Union and Asian countries actively embracing this RFID-based technology.
We have just rolled out an iPhone client that can be used to access Site24x7 website monitoring service. The interface lets you connect to Site24x7 and view the current status of the monitors in your account.
This is useful for you to get a quick overview of the status of your web sites while you are on the move. You can view the current uptime and performance statistics for each of your web sites. You can also view SLA reports and keep track of SLA compliance. There is a separate view for outage statistics for the last 24 hours. The design comes with a tabbed interface which lets you navigate easily between these views - uptime status, SLA reports and Outages.
From the "Home" tab, you can drill down and view the global status of the website for the last 24 hours as well as view info about response time, the primary location from where the website is being monitored, next polling time, etc. From the SLA tab, you can view a summary of the various service level agreements in place. For each SLA, you can drill down and view historical data such as the SLA Goal and SLA Achieved %.
The new client will be a useful tool for webmasters or website owners to check the uptime status & SLA compliance of websites. As always, we will be improving upon this tool in the future as we go along.
Looking forward to your feedback on the new iPhone client!
Once in a while we keep an eye on the blogosphere to understand how website monitoring services are being used by customers. While doing this, we do stumble upon certain blogs which educate their readers about website monitoring services. Here are a couple of such posts which we came across recently.
The first one was in affiliateranger.com site about the free website monitoring services available today. The article mentions Site24x7 as well as some other monitoring services. Here is what the blogger had to say about Site24x7:
Site24×7 is designed to maintain an optimal website user experience by monitoring the performance and availability of Web servers and applications from an end-user perspective. Site24×7 gives you the ability to monitor your visitors or customers-facing web properties on a global basis. Site24×7 will monitor any website from 15 locations; tracking the end-user experience from six sites in the US, three sites in Europe, and four in Asia, Australia and Africa. Site24×7 ensures the hardware and software supporting such critical functions as online purchases, site logins, web form submissions and more, are performing up to service level agreements (SLAs). Site24×7 includes an Operations Dashboard, through which all performance parameters are easily understood and any problems are automatically flagged for resolution.Read full article here.
Apesar de nunca ter testado, o Site24×7 inspira-me alguma confiança, não só devido a fazer a verificação em multiplas localizações, mas também por permitir a gestão de SLA (service-level agreements). Para além disso, tem ainda a favor o facto de ter uma API disponível e alertas via RSS, SMS e Mail.Read full article here.
