Archive for June, 2009

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.