Announcing SolarWinds Observability

Since launching we have been really busy listening to the feedback from our customers. And in retrospect we could have done some things better, and we are sorry for the sudden and big change this has been for you.

Today, we’re thrilled to take Pingdom BeepManager out of beta, and bring you a new and better way to work with your incidents. Internet is a fragile thing and stuff will break, so having the right person getting the right alert in the right way is an important part in our commitment to make the web faster and more reliable.

It’s been an amazing year for Pingdom, and we’ve done so many cool things and had a blast while doing them. To celebrate 2013 we put together a fun website where we highlight interesting milestones, statistics and facts about our year.

Today we have released a brand new Pingdom Android app. Like the iPhone app we released a short while ago, the Android app is completely reengineered from the ground up. With a new design and added functionality, the app puts more information about your website monitoring checks in your pocket. Whenever you receive an alert on your Android smartphone we want to help you get to what’s wrong as quickly as possible, then allow you to dig deeper.

The new app is available today from the Play Store. It’s of course free, so there’s no reason why you shouldn’t download it right away.

Today we’ve released a brand new Pingdom iPhone app. It’s completely reengineered from the ground up and puts outages in focus. Whenever you receive an alert on your iPhone we want to help you get to what’s wrong as quickly as possible, then allow you to dig deeper.

The new app is available today from the App Store. It’s of course free, so there’s no reason why you shouldn’t download it right away.

3 million unique visitors each day, that is how much traffic Aftonbladet.se, the biggest website in Sweden, handles. Add to that the 15 TB of data the site pumps out daily and you get some idea of the scale of its operations. And keep in mind Sweden is a country with only 9.6 million people.

We at Pingdom visited Aftonbladet recently to find out how this cutting edge website is managed and monitored, and met with two of the guys that made this all happen: Christian Lizell, Systems Architect, and Tobias Järlund, Lead Developer. Here’s what we found out about how they and the rest of the team keep the site ticking.

Shootitlive was born with a demo in a conference room at one of the biggest daily newspapers in Sweden. The demo was a hack hosted on one of the co-founder’s computers at home. A Shootitlive widget was inserted into a copy of the daily’s homepage. When photos started to appear on the fake homepage, merely seconds after the camera had captured the photo, the deal was in effect done.

That’s how Shootitlive got started and how it managed to sign up many of the biggest newspapers in Northern Europe as customers. On the bleeding edge of news photography and video, Shootitlive is now poised for further international expansion.

Today, the Pingdom team is heading to Webbdagarna (it means The Web Days in Swedish) in Gothenburg. It’s an ongoing series of two day conferences that take place in multiple cities around Sweden every year. This time the theme of Webbdagarna is “do it yourself.”

By the looks of it, there is a wide range of what must be very exciting sessions on offer. Both days there are also more specialized tracks, which attendees can choose from. Some of the topics covered during Webbdagarna include branding, digital disruption, ecommerce, web design, and web strategy.

But what’s your story? What is it that you’re looking forward to the most if you are also going to Webbdagarna? Let us know!

The first day of Monitorama in Berlin has been a whirlwind of talks on all kinds of interesting topics. All the presenters did a great job and managed to convey all kinds of exciting ideas and impressions. Our mind are buzzing, something that will not go away for a long time. Add the informal discussions in the hallway track and you have a full day that came and went all too quickly. Here’s a short wrap up of the first day of Monitorama in Berlin.

Later this week the Monitorama EU conference in Berlin kicks off, and Pingdom will be there. This is a two-day open source monitoring conference and hackathon, with what looks to be many exciting sessions. We look forward to a wide range of topics including alerting, logging, visualizations, website monitoring, and much more.

We will of course be attending lots of sessions , but we also want to take this opportunity to spend time with as many of you as possible.

Last week we held a webinar that covered three types of website monitoring: uptime monitoring, real user monitoring, and transaction monitoring. The response was excellent and we received so many great questions on a wide range of topics.

We know that some of you were not able to attend the webinar, or that you want a recording or slides for your records and here they are.

Working in the performance industry you’re surrounded by many technical terms. Of course, we need to have many terms and phrases to be able to communicate about specifics.

There’s no doubt that much of what we deal with on a daily basis can be very complex, so we need to be careful with how we label and describe things.

Are you curious about what a Pingdom account can do for you? Or do you want to further your knowledge of the importance of monitoring your websites and servers?

Then we have an exciting webinar for you. There is so much more to Pingdom than meets the eye and this is a golden opportunity to find out what and how.

Join us for a free webinar on September 4.

All of us working at Pingdom are geeks at heart and passionate about making the web faster and more reliable. Even though we work in different positions with different sorts of tasks, we all work together as a team to accomplish our goals.

With this article, we want to give you insight into who we are, not just as a company but as a team and as individuals.  Hopefully this will be a recurring feature on our blog and we kick off with featuring Morgan Sundqvist, Project Manager DevOps, and his first nine months at Pingdom.

In a recent blog post, Kevin Miller, Web Programming Specialist at California State University, Monterey Bay (CSUMB), mentioned how they monitor their various web services, including how they use Pingdom to keep things running. We took some time to talk to Kevin to find out more about CSUMB, their online services, and how they use Pingdom website monitoring.

We’ve covered how to use the Pingdom Transaction Monitor to keep an eye on logins and form submissions before here on the blog. Today we will take that a step further and look at how you can monitor logins and applications that require basic authentication. We’ll actually  present you with two ways of doing this: one using the Transaction Monitor and one using a regular HTTP check.

We take customer service very seriously at Pingdom. If you need to get in touch with us, for whatever reason, you can do so via phone, email, chat, and social media. We’ve even made it easy for you by collecting all service and support information in one place.

Twitter is one of the channels we use for support. In fact quite a number of messages to our Twitter account @pingdom are really support issues. Now we ask ourselves, and you, if we should set up a separate Twitter account just for support?

By monitoring your websites and servers with Pingdom, you can be the first to know if something is not working. That way, you can fix whatever is wrong before anyone else notices.

Getting an alert via email, SMS, Twitter or mobile app if something does go wrong is of course very helpful. But displaying the status of your websites on a dashboard can sometimes be a great complement.

At any given time, we have several people within Pingdom working on blog posts for the Royal Pingdom blog. Add to the mix that everyone has busy schedules with other tasks, the work on the blog is a melting pot made for scheduling problems and conflicts.

What keeps us sane and on track is a clever online project management service you may have heard of called Trello. Here is a description of how we use it, perhaps it can help you out as well.

As the first country ever to break through the 60 Mbps Internet speed barrier, Hong Kong has, according to the latest figures from Akamai, increased its lead over its closest rivals.

Now enjoying an average peak connection speed of 63.6 Mbps, people in Hong Kong should be saying to themselves, “wow, that’s fast.” Especially when you consider that the world average peak connection speed is 18.4 Mbps.