Website Monitoring NewsLatest posts and articles on website monitoring services.

It’s been a long year, but we are now in Beta and looking for testers. Ideally we would like a good cross-section of website owners, marketers, and agencies to use the service and give us feedback on it. We are working very hard to to provide the best possible website monitoring service, but we can’t do it without lots of feedback.

A little background on the testing done so far. We began using and testing the system in May 2009. Originally the service was conceived for Go Web Solutions, a web design and marketing firm. The goal was to provide staff with monitoring tool to deliver website management and marketing services, and to provide clients with reporting that shows how their site is performing at all times. As soon as the tool was implemented, it was a huge hit with clients.

Since May, we have had several dozen client domains in the system and being monitored. In that time we have identified and fixed several bugs, implemented numerous enhancements, and we have been creating a list of future enhancements that our users will find useful. Now that we are in Beta, it’s time to start putting a larger load on the system to test its stability and scalability.

Aaron, the amazing developer and co-creator of EZWM, has put some excellent tools in place that allow us to monitor the monitoring queues in real-time. This allow us to visually watch all types of monitors, across all servers, and see the real-time load on each server. This level of detailed monitoring of the queues will let us easily identify when upgrades are needed to the network and deploy additional resources.

<img class="aligncenter size-full wp-image-9" style="border: 1px solid black;" title="monitoring-tools” src=”http://www.website-monitoring.eu/wp-content/plugins/wp-o-matic/cache/3c695_monitoring-tools.jpg” alt=”monitoring tools We are now in Beta and looking for website monitoring testers” width=”656″ height=”346″ />

We are looking for the following types of beta testers:

1. Website Owners. The average website owners doesn’t know how their site is doing, they simple watch the traffic (if that). Our goal is to give website owners and simple way to actually monitor uptime, quality, keyword positions and popularity in one place. We need website owners that are looking for better tools to monitor their website and want to take the next step to controlling their success.

2. Power Users and Website Managers. EZ Website monitoring is a great tool for tracking multiple websites, making it easy for power users to track more than one website and always know how it’s performing. Typically this type of user has several sites they are responsible for, they have one or more hosting providers, and are responsible for getting traffic to those sites and converting that traffic into sales. This group will help us test the multi-domain capability of EZWM and the ease-of-use of monitoring more than one domain.

3. Agencies. Internet Marketing, SEO, Advertising agencies, New Media companies…whatever the name, we need testers like you to really push the system from the multi-domain/multi-client stand point. The idea is to provide you with the ability to manage multiple customer web sites from one interface and easily switch between website monitoring reports. We also want to test the notification and weekly reports, eventually giving you the ability to white-label the reports and notifications as a value-added service to your client.

If you know anyone that would be interested in testing our service, please have them sign up for the Beta and for 6 months of <a title="free website monitoring” href=”http://www.ezwebsitemonitoring.com”>free website monitoring. The Beta test is scheduled to end October 18th, 2009.

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Got Cacti? Proper disclosure – the author have never properly used Cacti as a monitoring system in a production environment. So what’s Cacti? – I’m not sure that after the proper disclosure I can actually comment too much, but from my first impression, Cacti is a fairly comprehensive server and network monitoring platform for Unix. It’ll support graphing [...]
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Released: August 25, 2011
ManageEngine, makers of a suite of cost-effective network, systems, applications and security management software solutions, today announced advances to help IT management professionals own the cloud — and manage the premises. With IT360, Applications Manager 10.0 and OpManager 9.0, ManageEngine offers an integrated IT management approach that addresses the demands of managing cloud, virtual and physical environments for all IT management professionals — from CIOs to IT managers to system administrators and beyond.
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<img alt="China" src="http://www.website-monitoring.eu/wp-content/plugins/wp-o-matic/cache/c79dc_5187447406_bc06f60243_o.png” title=”China” class=”alignright” width=”150″ height=”100″ />China is not only the largest nation on the planet, these days it’s also by far the largest on the Internet (which wasn’t always the case). It has twice as many Internet users as the United States. And it’s only getting started.

The current situation is as follows:

• Mainland China has 485 million Internet users.
• If you also include Hong Kong, that number rises to 490 million.
• That is 23% of the world’s 2.1 billion Internet users.
• The nearest country after China is the United States, with 245 million Internet users. That is, as we mentioned, half of what China has.

And yet China only has an Internet penetration of 36.3%. In other words, barely a third of its population uses the Internet. That’s very low compared to many other countries, for example the United States, which has an Internet penetration of 78.2%, or the United Kingdom with 82%.

Although China’s population isn’t expected to grow much over the coming decade due to quite aggressive population control, it’s already huge at 1.34 billion. That’s almost one fifth of the world’s population (6.94 billion) and a huge pool of potential Internet users.

China’s capacity for growth

That low Internet penetration coupled with China’s huge population means that the country’s presence on the Internet has plenty of room to grow.

If China today had the same Internet penetration as the United States, it would have over a billion Internet users.

We all know that China’s economy is developing at a frenetic pace, and the Chinese state has placed a strong emphasis on developing the country’s Internet infrastructure. A growing share of its population will have access to the Internet, of that there can be no doubt. A big question remains, though.

An assumption, and China’s record so far

This post of course makes one big assumption, and that is that China can reach the same level of Internet penetration currently enjoyed by countries like the United States and the United Kingdom. China has a huge population its own set of unique challenges, so it may be a long time before this happens. In fact, it may never happen. We don’t have that kind of crystal ball.

However, if you have any doubt about China’s capacity for growth on the Internet, let’s end this post with a brief look at how China’s position on the Internet changed between 2000 and 2010. Back in the year 2000, China had just 22.5 million Internet users. Ten years later, that number had risen to 420 million. And now, just a year later, it’s up to 485 million.

So even though China has just scratched the surface of its potential, it’s already an Internet superpower.

Data source: Internet World Stats for Internet usage numbers.

This was a post from the guys at Pingdom, a site monitoring service that makes sure you’re the first to know when your site is down. Check it out for free.

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google has always been influencing the way people run their online
businesses. Hence it is not surprising that any changes or updates coming out
of the Mountain View office in California is viewed with a sort of anxiety and
anticipation, more so after the recent Panda update.

google has been enthusiastic throughout about rich mark-up for search engines.
As a continuation of that legacy, this time google has rolled out, its new
feature called “Authorship” markup. Authorship markup is an attempt
to recognize the author of particular web content by linking it to a google
Profile, thereby giving more credibility to a webpage or web content showing up
in the search results. This new feature will show a thumbnail of your picture
alongside search results when applicable and the image will link to your google
Profile page. By attempting to give a ‘human face’ to search results, google
hopes to give more credibility to high quality content and eventually rank
search results. In the words of google Product Manager Sagar Kamdar,
“the goal of the feature is to identify and highlight high-quality
content”.

For those who are new to google’s Authorship markup, here is how the new
feature works. If you are the author of a webpage, blog or web content, google
wants you to link your work to your personal google Profile page and link it
back to the respective page. This way, google will be able to identify the
author of the web content by checking for a connection between the page and the
respective google Profile page. All you need to do is to use the attribute ?rel=author in your link that is pointing to your
google Profile and use a + (plus) character in the anchor
text. Add this link anywhere in your source code.  Once you add the link, update the google
Profile page by adding the respective link under Links > custom links
option.

For example, if I want to author mark this blog content to my google
Profile, I need to add the following link somewhere in the source of this
webpage;

 <a
href=” <a href="https://plus.google.com/”>https://plus.google.com/ my google profile id /

?rel=author”>Aravind+</a>

and I need to update this blog link in my google Profile page.

google search will display something like the below screenshot, when ?rel=author
parameter is added to a page that is being searched.

google recommends to add the google Profile link in the following places
depending on the type of the content and the number of authors.

• A common footer, header, or navigation page that appears on every page, in
  case of a single-author blog.

• The bottom or top of each individual post or article, in case of multiple
  author blogs or web pages.

• An author profile page on your site. For multiple-author sites that have
  profile pages for each contributor; every article should link to its author’s
  profile page using rel=”author” and update each author profile page
  with a link to that author’s google Profile.

How authorship can affect page
ranks?

So what are the implications of this new Authorship markup? This feature is
pretty new and it is too early to assess the exact implications with respect
to SEO and page ranking. Analysts are skeptical whether this will have the long
lasting impacts of the Panda update, where google punished mercilessly; those
who went back on quality. In the words of Othar Hansson, google wants to
collect information about the credibility of authors from all kinds of sources
and will eventually use it in ranking. So as of now, what you can expect is a
thumbnail of your photo alongside the search results, linking back to your google
Profile or author page.

But considering google’s emphasis on extremely high quality content; which
we saw during the recent Panda update, it is more than obvious that authorship
markup will eventually become an essential tool for search engine ranking. Linking
author profiles will also discourage content farms and limit their showing up
in search results. Another interesting part is google’s insistence on a google Profile to
effectively use authorship markup. This will definitely increase the popularity
of not only google Profiles, but also google +, where Profile is the bread and
butter.

So is it time for another change?

During the initial roll out, google said it is ‘experimenting with this
data to help people find content from great authors in search results’. How and
when this will actually affect search rankings, is something we have to wait
and watch for.

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We have just implemented two small modifications to the website:

1. The option to confirm the presence of the </html> tag (indicating if the whole page has been loaded) has been replaced with an option to confirm the presence of a user defined text string. In other words, the monitor can now look for any sentence or a tag you configure.

2. We have started to check and save downtime types. From now on, every unavailability event in the history will have this information next to its time and duration. Monitors can recognize the following outage types:

• specific server response (other than “200 OK”)
• timeout
• nophrase (when a defined text string hasn’t been found).

More to come soon.

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<img alt="Money" src="http://www.website-monitoring.eu/wp-content/plugins/wp-o-matic/cache/47aa2_110516-money.jpg” title=”Money” class=”alignnone” width=”580″ height=”175″ />

Here’s a thought, or rather a theory, that we’d love to run by you.

It starts with a little piece of irony. Most advertisers want people to buy their product, i.e. pay for it. When an app (on any platform) is free and sponsored by ads, a large portion of its user base will be people who want something for free. If we’re allowed to generalize here, they don’t want to pay if they can avoid it.

Spotted the problem yet?

How do you sell to people who don’t want to pay? This dilemma will be even more pronounced in apps where there are paid, ad-free options in addition to the free, ad-sponsored version. The most valuable customers for advertisers would be the ones who paid for an app, not the ones who opted for the free version.

This is a problem that in-app advertisers will have to somehow overcome if they don’t want to simply waste a large portion of their advertising efforts, which means:

Promoting something free.

This is of course not a new trick, but it makes even more sense when advertisers are targeting someone inside a product that is free. It essentially becomes an exercise in simply getting customers in the door, hoping to sell them something once they’re inside.

The question now is, how effective is that, really?

Yes, this was a super-short post, but we thought it was an interesting thing to bring up. What are your thoughts on this?

This was a post from the guys at Pingdom, a site monitoring service that makes sure you’re the first to know when your site is down. Check it out for free.

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<img class="alignleft size-thumbnail wp-image-922" title="Performance metrics" src="http://www.website-monitoring.eu/wp-content/plugins/wp-o-matic/cache/eaf9b_Performance-metrics-150×150.jpg” alt=”" width=”101″ height=”101″ />The most dangeours type of downtime is the one you don’t know about. It is discturbing how true that one line actually is. Should it occur, website/server downtime can and will cause problems and ripples throughout your organization. Before we get tarred and feathered for making such a bold statement, let us build our case.

The Problem

In this realworld situation, a business lost roughly 30% of their leads for July. Apart from their initial loss, they simply handed out a good portion of the market to their competitors, in high season. When the figures arrived, all hell broke loose. All major markets felt the downturn. In search for a logical explanation, hours of daytime were invested in finding the reason. After it was made clear that the traffic was stable, the management went on to search for answers somewhere down the line. The marketing team had to pull out detailed reports for their activities in the last three months. Seasonal sales people got numerous tests calls. A full-scale internal audit took place. This caused a ripple effect and the normal workflow was seriously disrupted.

Locating the Issue

<img class="alignright size-thumbnail wp-image-928" title="problem" src="http://www.website-monitoring.eu/wp-content/plugins/wp-o-matic/cache/eaf9b_problem-150×150.jpg” alt=”" width=”90″ height=”90″ />Upon request, the IT department emailed external statistics on the webserver’s uptime. They had employed the services of a website monitoring service (not ours). According to their information, the server only went down for 20 minutes that month during the scheduled maintenance. What they failed to notice is that the service they used only gave them figures of the network availability of the hardware device, not the server software. The machine was available nearly all the time, but was doing what it was supposed to (serving web pages) only ~80% of the time. We were able to find that out only after we began tracking the server ourselves.

We were able to locate the problem, because the service we chose to test with, actually tested the website itself. We tried loading all major application forms from multiple locations over a given period of time. It wasn’t long before we got the first alert about a page not loading. It turned out that the server was failing to deliver the pages after a certain number of concurent connections. With some modest server upgrades and clever workarounds by the IT department, all website returned to normal. Simply the hardware couldn’t take the load and the server software decided to drop a number of queries in order to serve the rest.

The website service, employed by the business, worked exactly as it should. What was referred to as website uptime was actually server uptime.

Quick Tips

• Network availability is only a prerequsite for a website to function properly. Even if the site loads sucessfuly it is not clear if the forms on the site will be 100% functional.
• One good sign to look for, when trying to find the exact cause for problems with your traffic and conversion rate, are the traffic sources. If you notice significant decrease accross all mediums, then it is most likely that your website is not performing as expected.
• Make sure you are using the service you need. You can test our range of <a title="website and server monitoring services” href=”http://www.websitepulse.com/help/tools.php” target=”_blank”>website and server monitoring services completely free.

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First up, we invite you to follow us at our newly acquired @wormly <a href="http://www.website-monitoring.com/blog/2010/05/04/twitter-facts-and-figures-history-statistics/”>twitter account, where we’ll be talking about features, updates, bug fixes, and other items generally too small to warrant a blog post. Follow @wormly Today we’ve deployed a bunch of changes to the Wormly API (WAPI), including: getAlertMatrix and setAlertMatrix give you [...]
<a href="https://www.wormly.com/blog/2011/08/17/new-api-features-<a href="http://www.website-monitoring.com/blog/2010/05/04/twitter-facts-and-figures-history-statistics/”>twitter-feature-notifications/” rel=”nofollow”>Go to Source

In this example, we use the getAlertMatrix and setAlertMatrix API commands to copy the alert recipient matrix from one host to another. These commands are intended for use on any UNIX-like system, and require cURL (version >= 7.18) and a command line PHP interpreter. Also be sure to grab a Wormly API key first. Visit [...]
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