Archive for the ‘IT’ Category

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.

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?