We’ve recently added response time alert functionality, a great new feature which generates outage notification whenever a service responds slower than a given threshold value.  Combined with our high-frequency outage monitoring and server-side resource monitoring, response time alerts give you a complete toolset to detect and respond to websites that are responding slowly, before your visitors head elsewhere.

Configuration of the response time alerts is quite simple - when configuring a service check just provide a threshold response time and duration.  Whenever your service responses take longer than the threshold time we begin tracking a potential outage.  If this lasts for longer than the configured duration an alert is generated and delivered according to your notification schedule.

Response time alerts are included with the Intermediate and Advanced packages, and can be configured through the Edit Service interface. Trial customers also have full access to response time alerts for the duration of the trial.

We’re quite excited to add this new functionality to our offering, and have a number of other features currently under development that will further help you minimize disruptions to your online infrastructure.  Feel free to contact Support if you have any questions about the configuration and usage of response time alerts or other suggestions on how we can help improve your online operations.

I’m happy to announce our latest partnership with VIP Backup, an IT services company based in Salt Lake City, Utah, that specializes in advanced backup and data protection services for small businesses.  Their online backup service is a great way to ensure that your data is safe in the event that disaster should strike.

If you’re not currently backing up your critical corporate or personal data, I highly encourage you to check out their offerings quickly before you lose a single byte.  And then relax knowing that your critical data is safe with VIP Backup and your servers are watched by Panopta!

There was an interesting article on the recent performance of various media websites during last week’s crush of traffic related to the passing of Michael Jackson.  The interesting aspect of what was found was that the major media sites themselves were responding fairly normally, but various third-party additions to the sites that were actually overloaded.

From a visitor’s perspective, this is a largely irrelevant difference - the end result is that pages load and render slowly.  From a standpoint of a website operator, it is an important difference.  Modern webpages are made up of content from quite a few sources, in addition to the core content from your web server, it’s common to have addition content from third-party advertising engines, web analytics tools, mashups of other applications such as Twitter.

We designed our advanced service detection logic to help our users to configure monitoring for all relevant services that affect your website.  For example, for abc.com, one of the sites that had problems last week, we found the following services:

In addition to the core content, there are nine off-site services that are actively used on the page.

Many of you are probably asking yourself “that’s great, I can see if there are problems with other services, but they’re not managed by me so what can I do about problems?”.  This is a very good question and, admittedly, there are a lot fewer options for responding to problems but there are still some important things that can be done.

First, if you know about a problem you can bring it to the attention of the service provider - many companies are still lacking a solid monitoring system and may not even know that they’re having problems.  If that doesn’t work, you can resort to making direct changes on your site, such as temporarily disabling third-party content during the outage in order to keep your site responsive.  There are always trade offs to consider with this, but the most important aspect is to know there is a problem and have options in terms of how you respond.

If you’re not currently a Panopta customer, take our free trial and see for yourself what impact third-party components have on your site.

As of this morning, voice outage alerts are now live for all Panopta customers to use - in addition to SMS and email outage alerts, you can now get a phone call and have details of active outages read to you over the phone. For all packages, both trial and paying, voice alerts are counted as part of the SMS quota, so customers on the Basic Monitoring package and above will get unlimited voice alerts included with their account.

Thanks to all of our beta testers who have been trying the service for the past month or so - their feedback and suggestions have been quite helpful!

Voice alerts can be activated now in the contacts section of the monitoring control panel.  If you have any questions on the voice alerts, feel free to contact our support team for assistance.

We’re happy to announce that our newest feature has just been released for public beta testing.  You can now receive outage alerts via voice phone calls, in addition to email and SMS messages.  This gives you another option for being alerted to any problems with your servers, so you can respond and resolve as quickly as possible.

If you’re interested in joining the public beta program, please let us know and we’ll be glad to enable voice alerts for your account.

At Panopta, we pride ourselves in making sure that you’re notified about problems with your server as soon as possible.  This lets you take action right away to keep your customers happy.

Our unique notification schedules give you lots of control to choose who gets notified when, but what about the times when you don’t want to be notified right away?  We have a solution for that as well with our maintenance schedule feature.  Maintenance schedules let you define a period of time, either one time or recurring, during which you want to modify how outage notifications are handled.  During maintenance, you can either use a different notification schedule or disabled notifications entirely.

As the screenshot below shows, there’s quite a bit of flexibility in how maintenance periods are scheduled, as well as the ability to choose whether to advertise your upcoming maintenance periods in your public reports or exclude outages during the maintenance from availability calculations.

User interface for editing maintenance schedules.

There are lots of potential uses for this, including handling weekly or monthly maintenance windows, using alternate notification schedules at different times of day, and to avoid triggering outage alerts during system upgrades.  If you have ideas for other create uses, please let us know - we’ll publish the best here and in our newsletter.

Today we’re excited to launch a new partnership with Conseo, Inc. to provide a comprehensive support and monitoring service for SharePoint installations.  Consejo, a fellow Chicago company, are experts at the design, development and management of complex SharePoint installations for small and medium businesses. The offering, called “SharePoint Operational Support Solution”, combines Panopta’s advanced server monitoring of SharePoint server farms with managed patchs and hot fixes,  level 2 and 3 support and strategic planning for current and future operational readiness from Consejo.

This partnership marks the first use of our new Remote Agent API, which allows the development of custom, application-specific monitoring agents that can be deployed behind firewalls on internal servers that are typically not accessible from remote monitoring services.  These agents gather information locally and push the data to Panopta’s global monitoring infrastructure where it feeds into our standard reporting and notification tools.  Heartbeat support generates outage alerts automatically if data stops coming in from the remote agent.

The Remote Agent API is currently in available for use by an initial group of partners.  Later this summer, the API will be opened for more general use.  In the meantime, if you’re interested in building a custom agent please let us know and we’d be happy to work with you.

For more details on the Sharepoint offering, see the press release or the full offering description.

Just the other day, we completed our one billionth check of a customer’s server.  The lucky check was performed by our monitoring server in Singapore, and fortunately it showed that the customer’s server is up.

We look forward performing many billions of checks in the future!

There was an interesting thread on Slashdot the other day that raises some great points about how to best stay alerted to IT problems.  Most people these days have migrated to notification via cell phone, Blackberry, etc.  Personally, I’ve switched to an iPhone earlier this year and have been very satisfied with it.  I’m not one to normally drink the Apple kool-aid, but with it’s incredible screen and the release of several good SSH clients it has proven to be a very useful tool for sysadmins and other people that have to respond to emergencies while out and about.

That is, except for it’s really sub-par SMS support.  Compared to old-school pagers, which could be set to wake even the deepest sleeper, the iPhone’s SMS options are surprising limited.  None of the standard SMS tones is even remotely jarring enough, vibrate mode is easily missed if the phone’s in your pocket, and Apple for some reason chose not to allow you upload custom SMS tones like you can ringtones.

At least with the 2.1 firmware release they now sound the SMS tone three times if you don’t acknowledge it.  A step in the right direction, but there’s still a long way to go. I’m surprised that some enterprising developer hasn’t written a quick program to give you more control over the SMS configuration - I’d happily pay good money for something like this if Apple isn’t able to solve this.

There are some other options - we’ve considered using a service such as email2phone to convert emails into phone calls that can trigger a special ringtone for alerts.  But then you run into issues with possible email delays, etc. to work around what should be a pretty simple problem to solve.

Share your experience in the comments - how satisfied are you with your mobile device?  Any recommendations of phones that work great as pagers?  Or others in particular to avoid?

I’m writing a series of articles for Jolt Magazine entitled Graceful Failure, which covers the best ways to maximize the availability of your online presence.  It’s targeted to MicroISVs and SaaS providers, but should have useful information for most anyone that is responsible for an online presence.

The main idea of the series is, in a nutshell, that things will break but that you can prepare for them so that you can minimize the impact of failure and keep your site online and accessible to your customers.  The first article is available now, which covers some general strategies for maximizing uptime, and will be followed by articles covering each of the components that make up a modern online presence.

If you haven’t seen it already, Jolt is a online magazine that is a collaboration of a number of ISVs and service providers, covering all aspects of building and running a software company.  Starr Horn, the founder of Jolt, has done a great job bringing together a number of great contributers with real-world experience building real companies, and I’m honored to contribute to the site.  I hope you find the articles useful, and I welcome any comments or feedback either here or on the Jolt site.