Webmasters and website owners will know how important it is to ensure their web applications are performing as expected for end users. Site24x7’s web application monitor makes it easier for them to keep track of the availability and performance of web applications such as customer logins or shopping cart purchases. The monitor sends out notifications if it detects any problem with the transaction, such as an unwanted downtime or a slow response time.
An important use of web application monitor, which sometimes gets overlooked, is its ability to assist in fine-tuning the performance of applications. Since the monitor provides you with historical data of key performance metrics, you gather a substantial amount of useful information about your web application over the course of time. This information can be used to proactively improve your web application and make it an absolute joy for customers to interact with.
Scott Savage has explained this beautifully in his blog. In fact, he mentions Site24x7’s web application monitor as one of his top 3 tools for fine-tuning web applications.
Some excerpts: Performance Monitoring – It is a great idea to do user testing and time how long it takes to follow a path through your application, for example logging into your web-based CRM application, searching with some set terms, returning a result and then displaying the details of this result. You can time it in a user session, providing you with valuable (but once off) time information about user scanning and data entry time. How does this time differ at 9am Monday versus 3am Thursday? A web application performance monitoring tool like site24×7 allows you to run this path automatically every 5 minutes, 24×7. This not only allows you to check your servers are serving your application at a consistent time, but even just serving it at all. It will email you immediately when your application stops responding, send you a weekly performance summary report, show you performance from multiple locations around the world and even help you independently track your SLA compliance (and even publish all this via an API or public page).
Don’t wait for your customers to call you and complain, these tools make feedback easy, even to the point where users are providing it instantly without even realising. The next step is using these tools to proactively improve your web application, which of course is easier said than done. Just remember you have to measure before you can manage.
It has been an exciting and eventful year for us here at Site24x7. We grew a lot this year, both in terms of features added to our monitoring service as well as expanding our user base. Here is a quick recap of what went into Site24x7 in 2009.
- Five new locations were added to our global monitoring network. Servers were added in China, Japan, India, Brazil and Sweden.
- Support for 10 new languages including French, German, Spanish, Chinese Simplified, Japanese, etc.
- New monitor types such as POP, Port, SMTP.
- REST APIs for developers.
- Enhanced SLA monitoring capabilities
- Major enhancements to website monitor including 3-minute monitoring intervals, option to mark trouble as downtime and downtime as maintenance, etc.
- Reseller programs for businesses.
- iPhone client
- Uptime buttons to help webmasters showcase the uptime of their websites, and more.
We want to thank you for your fantastic support throughout 2009. We promise to keep improving and to keep introducing new features/enhancements in the coming year as well.
Happy holidays and a prosperous new year!
It's festive time in most parts of the world now and in keeping with this spirit, we are offering some cool bargains on Site24x7.
If you upgrade to a monthly subscription, you will get 30% off your first bill. If you choose yearly subscription, you will get 40% off your first bill. This offer is applicable on all our user packages: Standard, Professional and Enterprise.
If you already have a free/trial account with us, click the 'Upgrade' link within your account to avail this offer. If you don't have an account, you can sign up for a free trial and then upgrade.
Happy Holidays!
Our Chinese monitoring location has been temporarily rendered out of service. This is due to an unprecedented disruption of network activity at the datacenter level, and this reportedly affects tens of thousands of websites. You can read more info on this downtime from our web host's blog:
http://blog.sinohosting.net/china-servers-downtime-notice/
In order to ensure our China location users are not affected, we have routed the monitoring to our Japan server. All users who have configured China as their primary monitoring location will now have their monitoring checks coming from Japan.
We thank you for your understanding and regret the inconvenience caused. We will be shifting the monitoring to China as soon as the connection is restored.
What do you think is the fastest growing domain name on the internet? It is the Chinese (.cn) domain. As the Chinese economy is growing, so is the number of internet users in China. In fact, the number of Internet users in China surpassed the US in 2008.
According to CNNIC, there were 298 million Chinese Internet users by end of 2008 and growing at 800,000 new users per day. It is currently 22% of Internet users worldwide, and could surpass Internet users in Europe very soon. This is to say the least an impressive growth rate.
Also, there is a new top level domain that will be offered to users. (.China) will solely consist of Chinese characters. Until now China has had to settle for .cn, which is incomprehensible to the typical Chinese Internet user.
.cn is today the largest ccTLD and the 2nd most registered top level domain after .com with almost 17 million registrations. Since CNNIC has made it very easy to register .cn domain names, .china is expected to have similar regulations. So it can be expected that the new top level domain will surpass .cn inside 2-5 years after launch, and .cn will only serve for users using Latin characters.
As announced in an earlier post, we’ve recently introduced monitoring servers in Brazil and Sweden. The Brazil server is located in Rio De Janeiro and the Swedish one is at Stockholm.
These additions further augment our global monitoring network and takes the total location count to 17. The Brazil server is our first in South America. The Sweden server is our fourth location in Europe to go with UK, Netherlands and Germany. We now offer monitoring from every continent except for Antartica!!
We will be adding more locations to our network based on user demand, so stay tuned to this space for more updates.
We recently had an update here at Site24x7. Here is a brief overview of the features/enhancements that have gone into this update.
1. Option to integrate website uptime and performance data into intranet portals/applications:
We have provided access to secure public views for all the monitors in your account. These views display the uptime and performance data of the websites you are monitoring, and these views can be easily integrated into any third-party application or corporate/intranet portals. Users can thus get a perspective of the performance of their websites from outside the datacenter, and they can get it right within any application or corporate/intranet portal.
Below is a sample Dashboard View integrated into ManageEngine Applications Manager product.
There are some occasions when you may want to take your web site, web application or servers offline for some upgrade or maintenance purpose. To prevent your sites or applications from being monitored during the maintenance period, you should configure a maintenance schedule for your monitors and thus avoid unnecessary notifications from Site24x7.
Given below are step-by-step instructions on how to configure a maintenance schedule in Site24x7.
Add Schedule Screen
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.
