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.

You can specify maintenance period in 2 different ways:

1. Create a Maintenance schedule for the monitor: If you know the maintenance time  beforehand or if the downtime is a recurring event, you can create a maintenance schedule for the time period. Once you create a schedule, the site will be automatically marked as 'under Maintenance' for the timeframe of the schedule.
2. Mark downtime as Maintenance: Lets assume you forgot to configure a maintenance schedule and Site24x7 marked your site as down. However, since you know this is scheduled maintenance and don't really need to consider this as downtime, you can use the "Mark Downtime as Maintenance" option and mark the specific downtime as maintenance. Click the Mark as Maintenance icon from the downtime table in the monitor details page to convert a downtime to maintenance period.

Ability to add your own comments to the downtime

A second enhancement that has been included in our service is the option to specify your own comments for the downtimes. These comments can be anything that reflects the nature of the downtime or the reason for the downtime, etc.

These comments can be made public as well, so your visitors can also know the reason why your site went down.

What is your take on our latest enhancements? Feel free to comment or contact us directly for any questions.

The Wimbledon Final yesterday, was an epic battle between two great Tennis players : Roger Federer Vs Andy Roddick.  The game was exhilarating to say the least. The scores : 5-7 7-6 7-6 3-6 16-14 Last game, 16 - 14 ! That makes it actually a 6 sets match. While watching the match, my mind was just trying to think what was going through the minds of the two players. Both had very powerful serves, both were superbly fit players, played great tennis with huge amount of concentration. However both made surprisingly unusual errors (an eg. mishitting the ball high up and ending with the ball going out). Federer was making it (unforced errors) too frequently all along until the 11th game of the last set. While Andy did it in the last game of the last set. It proved too costly for Andy though. He lost the game and with that the championship. That's how websites too could behave. Even if you have the most powerful servers, you still can have trouble with a few revenue critical web transactions which can affect your bottom-line. These transactions could work fine most of the time, but the few times it misbehaves could cost your dear. Why would these transactions fail ?

• Lots of users coming to your website during peak hours.
• New update made by your development team caused a transaction to fail under certain conditions. Eg: when selecting the option, "Book by ISBN number" the transaction failed.

These failed transactions could even have been high valued transactions. That is why you need to monitor your e-commerce transactions and take corrective actions immediately. Customers visit your website with an intention to make a decision and buy immediately. This means, your website should not only respond quickly but also support the other transactions consistently. With site24x7 Web Application Monitoring capability, you can make sure your e-commerce transactions work as expected. Lets take an example of an Online Book Store. John is a graduate student and looking to buy a book on Economics. He is trying to find the lowest prices offered on the web. John searches for different websites offering this. He tries to open up 5 to 10 sites that got listed in search results for the book he wants. Some of the sites did not load itself, he just closes those browser windows. Narrows down to a few good ones site A and site B.  Site A lists the book for $10 and in Site B its present for $9. He decides to buy from Site B. However Site B was broken when it comes to the step to make the payment when he used the "ISBN number" to buy the book. He goes to the Site A and tries to buy from there. He is successful and was happy it was real quick too. He did not regret paying that extra dollar. Site A won this customer !  Though this transaction is worth just $10, where do you think John will go the next time ? Trust is worth more than just the first transaction. With Site24x7 you can make sure your e-commerce transactions work as advertised. Know more about web application monitoring.

Do you manage websites belonging to multiple companies? Do you need to keep tabs on the uptime and performance of websites on a company-wise basis? The "monitor group" feature in Site24x7 will allow you to do just that. The monitor group lets you organize or group multiple monitors into a group. You can use this to tag different websites or servers belonging to a particular client/company into a single group. If you have multiple clients, you can create multiple groups.

A Sample Monitor Group

The advantage with this is you get group-wise downtime and performance reports, so you know exactly how your client is performing.

Group-wise Performance Reports

Setting up a monitor group is very easy. Just click the 'Monitor Group' link to open up a wizard from where  you can select the monitors to be part of the group.

The monitor group feature will be very useful for managed service providers who monitor web sites and servers belonging to multiple clients. This is available in the recently-launched Site24x7 Enterprise Account.

What is your take on the monitor group feature? Do let us know your feedback!

Author: Arun Along with our Enterprise Account release last month, we also added more monitoring locations to our global monitoring network. These locations include Seattle, Chicago & Dallas in the United States, Germany in Europe, Australia, and South Africa in the African continent. This now takes our location count into the double digit figures, its on 12 right now. If you wonder what this means to users, well, it means our users can now monitor the uptime & performance of their business-critical websites from up to 12 different geographical locations, just to make sure their sites are accessible and performing well from across the world. With the addition of new monitoring locations, our monitoring network now has a more global outlook. We have monitoring servers in almost every continent, except for South America. Our South American users, however, need not feel left out. We do have plans to introduce servers in your continent very soon. We've taken care to use only the best hosting providers and hardware in all our monitoring locations. To ensure uninterrupted monitoring from our monitoring servers, please make sure your firewalls allow all requests coming with user agent "Site 24 X 7". More info on our monitoring network here.

We’d introduced website monitoring from multiple locations in Site24×7 quite a while ago. Now with our most recent update, we have enhanced our multi-location monitoring capabilities and expanded our monitoring network to make it more global in nature. We have added monitoring servers in 4 new locations across the globe - two in the US, and one each in Asia and Europe. These along with our existing monitoring locations in California and UK take our location count to 6.

Our global monitoring network

Listed below are our current active monitoring locations and their ip addresses. To ensure uninterrupted monitoring from all these locations, please make sure your firewalls allow these ip addresses. California (72.5.250.84) Houston (75.125.250.20) New Jersey (66.246.218.186) UK (91.186.0.4) Netherlands (84.244.138.41, 84.244.138.42, 84.244.138.43, 84.244.138.44) Singapore (203.211.133.45) Earlier, the bulk of the monitoring used to be done from our primary location (California) and only rechecks were done from secondary locations. Now, you can specify the locations from which your website needs to be monitored (available in Premium Account). For example, if most of the visitors to your site are from US & Europe, you may configure monitoring from US and Europe. This way you can be sure that your websites are up and available to people who matter the most to your business. Note: We currently monitor only the uptime of websites from different locations. Other monitor types such as Web Application monitor, Web Page Analyzer, Email Server, DNS server monitor, etc. are monitored from a single location only (California). Over the course of time, multi-location monitoring support will be extended to other monitor categories also. What is your take on our newly enhanced monitoring network? Pour in your feedback!

Website defacement is any unauthorized access of a website by a hacker or a system cracker. A hacker might break into the web server and create a page of his own. When visitors come to the website, they might get to see a totally different page or it might perform unexpected actions. Typically hackers leave some messages or shoutouts to their friends. Most of the defacements are harmless, but sometimes they can used to cover up something more sinister such as uploading malware or spyware. Webmasters and website owners usually take necessary precautions to ensure their websites do not fall into unauthorized hands. In spite of all these efforts, some malicious hackers do manage to gain unauthorized access to the site. The recent hacking of a UK website is an example. For a webmaster, what's worser than web page defacement is not even knowing about it. Imagine coming to know of it from your users. This is another reason why you should continuously monitor your web pages. It is not enough if you monitor the website's downtime or performance alone. You should keep an eye on website content as well to know if someone has defaced your website. With Site24x7, you can check for the presence or absence of any keywords or phrases on your web page. If any keyword or phrase is available or not available, Site24x7 will alert you. You can also configure Site24x7 to alert you when your website content changes or when your web page is modified. Using our web page defacement monitoring features, you will instantly know when someone has gained access to your website and changed its contents so that you can initiate corrective actions quickly. What do you think of the web page content monitoring features of Site24x7 ? Reply through comments or contact our support team directly.

Here's a question about the Web Page Analyzer monitor that came to our support team recently. Just thought of sharing this here in the blog so that it will be useful for other users as well. The way Web Page Analyzer works, it seems show that some images and javascripts get downloaded in parallel. Is this way of loading a web page the standard way followed by Internet Explorer and Firefox? When a page is requested from the server, we open a HTTP connection for the main HTML file for that page. For every single other element on that page, images, css files, scripts, we will open another HTTP connection to the server and pick up objects in the order in which they are present in the web page. Many of the images and javascripts in the page will get downloaded in parallel, but not all. When downloading a web page, the WPA gets the HTML output of that web page, pick up all the objects in the order in which they are present in the web page and finally execute one object after the other. Some objects are downloaded in parallel, but not all. Let's take an example here to explain this better. Consider 'test.jsp' which has 11 objects present in an order shown below: JS, CSS, IMG, CSS, IMG, IMG, IMG, CSS, JS, JS , IMG After collecting all these elements present in order, the WPA will execute them one after the other. The logic here is that all the images that comes in a stretch and the next element after those will be done in parallel. Step 1 - Request sent for JS . Step 2 - Request sent for CSS. Step 3 - Next up is IMG and CSS. So, for IMG and CSS objects, WPA will span requests in parallel. Step 4 - Similarly requests sent for IMG, IMG, IMG and CSS in parallel. These objects will be downloaded simultaneously. Step 5 - Separate requests sent for JS, JS and IMG and they will be downloaded separately. Of course, this approach is the best understanding of what browsers do and its not according to the HTTP standard.

Author: Arun Site24x7's daily / weekly reports are a great way to keep tabs on the uptime and performance of your web sites, applications and mail servers. You just need to configure monitors one time within your Site24x7 account and these reports will start coming right to your mailbox. So you need not login to Site24x7 to know the status of your sites. A recent enhancement that we made to this section is the ability to schedule these reports at a date/time of your choice. In the case of daily reports, you can set up the time when you want the report to be emailed to you. For weekly reports, you can set the date and time when the report will be emailed.

To enable this scheduling, you just need to navigate to the 'Reports' section under the 'Accounts' tab, and select the date/time when these daily/weekly reports need to be emailed. We introduced this enhancement based on user feedback. More such usability enhancements are on the way, so keep your feedback coming in!!

Author: Arun Any business web site owner or webmaster will know the perils of slow-loading web pages and what they can do to drive away users from the web site. One of their main concerns should be to ensure their web pages are loading fast enough for the users. Sometimes the web page might load fast enough for some users but not all users might share the same experience. It is therefore important to have a look at things from an end-user perspective. Here is where the Web Page Analyzer monitor (WPA) can help. It will let you understand how exactly your web page loads the first time, from an end-user perspective. It downloads the full content of your web page including the header and all HTML contents, and objects including images, css, java scripts, etc. It provides you with the total load time of the web page as well as the individual load times of all its components.

You can find out how fast your page is loading, which component is slowing down your page, how to improve page load time, etc. The web page summary section provides insightful data such as total page load time, total page size, total objects, images, css, java scripts, etc.

The WPA is more advanced than a web site monitor. Basic web site monitoring only monitors the uptime and performance of websites, but the WPA can do much more. It helps you find out how much each component is contributing to the total response time of a web page. You can check if the image/script/css count of your home page exceeds a certain limit, or if the image size increases beyond an upper limit, or if the image size changes, etc. What is your opinion of the Web Page Analyzer (WPA)? Let us know your feedback.

Author: Arun There are some occasions when you may want to take your web site, web application or e-mail server offline for some upgrade or maintenance purpose. In such cases, you will receive notifications indicating that the site, or the application are unavailable. Since the site is not available when pinged during the maintenance period, unnecessary notifications are sent. To prevent your sites or apps from being monitored for status during maintenance, you can schedule a maintenance task for such monitors. To schedule a maintenance task, click 'Schedule Maintenance->Add Schedule' link. Provide details such as schedule name, description, recurrence details (i.e. daily, weekly or once), start and end times. All the monitors configured in your account will be listed in the 'Available Monitors' box. Select the required monitors and move it to the 'Selected Monitors' box. Click the 'Add' button to complete the configuration. The details of the schedule can then be seen from the 'Schedule Details' section under 'Alerts' tab.

Once the schedule is activated, you will not receive notifications from Site24x7 during that time period. What's your take on the 'Schedule Maintenance' enhancement? Pour in your feedback to support@site24x7.com