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.
As you must have known by now, Twitter was recently hacked and defaced by a group claiming to be the Iranian Cyber Army. The hackers managed to compromise Twitter's DNS records and left a defacement message on the website. Both twitter.com and status.twitter.com were down and some users faced a temporary problem with sending tweets. There has been extensive coverage of this downtime in various tech blogs such as Techcrunch.
The Twitter status page provides the latest updates on this incident: We are working to recovery from an unplanned downtime and will update more as we learn the cause of this outage.
Update (11:28p): Twitter’s DNS records were temporarily compromised but have now been fixed. We are looking into the underlying cause and will update with more information soon
This hacking, although lasting only for a short duration of time, did manage to garner attention.
Now if this can happen to the best of services, it can happen to your site as well. In most cases, hackers have political intentions and they leave politically motivated messages on the site as in the recent Twitter example, or alter the content of the site. If your website encounters such a problem, you can set up website content monitoring to be aware of the problem before it affects your website visitors/customers.
On some occasions, hackers manage to gain access to your DNS records and make them point to alternate sites. If you are monitoring DNS records, you can instantly become aware of this problem and rectify it quickly.
For webmasters and website owners, it does make sense to follow the relevant security guidelines and best practices to keep the hackers at bay. Even then, hackers do manage to break through even the toughest security controls and gain access. The least a webmaster can do is to use a good website monitoring service such as Site24x7 (shameless plug
) to continuously monitor websites for any defacement!
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!
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.
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.
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.
This is our 4th monitoring location in Asia after Singapore, China and Japan. With the addition of this new monitoring location, the number of locations in our Global Website Monitoring Network has gone up to 15.Do you manage a personal or business website? Do you know if your website is up and running when you’re not online and monitoring yourself the site? Today, we’ll review an important and useful service that will allow you to monitor your website, services and servers around the globe and be notified the uptime and performance of your websites. Let’s review: Site24×7.You can read the full article here. The second article is in the Techmixer website. This one is actually a compilation of some of the free website monitoring services available today and the list includes Site24x7 among other services. Here are a few excerpts:
Subscribe monitoring website uptime is essential services for every webmaster. With the website uptime monitoring services, you can earlier aware the downtime of your website and take necessary step to overcome the downtime problem.
Most of us nowadays own a blog and when it comes to high traffic load, we cannot actually say when will the website/blog server goes down. Without a proper web monitoring service, it would be difficult to check the uptime of the server and which in turn would end up losing visitors and monetization revenue for the blog.
Site 24 X 7 offer free two website monitoring for their free account every 60 minutes or above. The URL address uptime and performance will be monitor from multiple geographical locations. Plus you will get email/SMS alerts and reports. Beside that, Site 24 X 7 also monitor DNS servers & email server round-trip timeYou can read the full article here. Have you come across any blog post or article about Site24x7? If so, please feel free to share with us.
