Announcing SolarWinds Observability

Hosted by Stewart Cheifet, the tech-focused television program Computer Chronicles ran from 1983 to 2002. For many, it was the place to go to for the latest news, help with technology, and much more.

We browsed the archive of the Computer Chronicles, kept available by the Internet Archive and came up with these nuggets of tech history from the 1980s and 1990s.

Remember, some of this may seem a bit silly today, but back then it was state of the art.

It may not be something you lay awake at night thinking about, but what if your website would happen to be down for one or a few minutes, would Google then penalize you for that?

Since we all worry about what Google thinks about our sites so that we can appear as favorably in its services as possible, hearing straight from Google would be worth a lot, and now we have.

When it comes to taking care of our networking infrastructure here at Pingdom, the DevOps team works with a wide range of hardware and software tools.

With this article, we want to give you some suggestions for command line tools and utilities that are a common part of our toolbox. We have tried to make a varied selection so that there is hopefully something in here that you find useful in your daily admin work.

Are you storing your files in the cloud? If you are, which cloud storage service are you using? Storing files in the cloud is convenient, but it means you want fast and reliable access to your information at any given time. And if the service is unavailable or your Internet connection is messing up you are in a pickle.

Last year we investigated the reliability and performance of four popular cloud storage services: Box, Dropbox, Google Drive, and SkyDrive. We repeated the same study a year later. Read on to find out what the situation is like in 2013.

Today, we extend the beta program of BeepManager, our brand new alert system, to all Pingdom customers on the Personal, Pro or Team plan.

After last weeks announcement at the the Velocity Conference and the great response BeepManager received then, we now look forward to many more of our customers trying out the new alert system.

Day two of the Velocity conference in Santa Clara is over and before we head to get some shut-eye we’ll give you an update of the day. It certainly was packed from early morning with interesting and exciting sessions.

Although we tried to take in as much of the presentations as possible we also spent time in the exhibit area as well as in the hallways to talk to colleagues, partners, and others. Arguably much of the value you get from attending Velocity comes from the time you spend in between sessions. Now, let’s have a look at what happened today.

We all know that things happen on the Internet and sites go down for all kinds of reasons. If something would happen to your site you should, of course, monitor it so you are the first to know of any issues. Just as you have backup and antivirus in place for your computer, you should have monitoring in place for your websites.

To give you an idea of how the Internet is feeling right now, we created this animated map of the world. It shows all the outages we have detected in the last hour (on a rolling basis). That means that whenever you visit the page it will show you the outages we’ve detected in the past our, so it’s always giving you an up-to-date view of what’s been happening around the world as we see it.

Today we’re announcing the immediate and exclusive availability of the beta version of our brand new alert system called BeepManager to participants at the Velocity conference. The BeepManager represents another important step on our quest to make the web faster and more reliable.

We completely overhauled the alert system in our monitoring services and created something very modern and flexible. With the new BeepManager you can manage and track incidents, set a currently On-duty Schedule as well as a planned Maintenance Schedule. Incidents can automatically escalate following an Alert Policy, and users can assign, reassign, acknowledge, and complete tasks.

Day one of the Velocity conference in Santa Clara is over and we’ve had a great day. From arriving this morning to finishing up the sessions in the afternoon, it was full speed ahead with web performance and ops.

We’ve rarely seen such a high concentration of web geeks in one place, and even though the wifi was shaky to say the least, we had a great time. Here’s a brief report from the first day of Velocity.

Pingdom is again packing its bags and heading to the annual Velocity Conference in Santa Clara, California. It’s a place where the core of our industry meets up to share experience and knowledge, and debate how we best solve the issues facing us all.

Velocity for us is very much about exploring and finding out the most interesting things when and where you least expect it. This includes presentations and tutorials, the always-rewarding hallway track, and everything in between.

DreamHack is a big event by any measure and some Pingdom geeks will be at the next one starting this Saturday June 15.  How about almost 21k participants in 2011, 12,000 devices connected to the LAN, and 120Gbps Internet connection?

DreamHack is a LAN party, concert, digital arts festival, and more, all rolled into one, and you need to be properly prepared to take advantage of everything on offer. After exhaustive research in the Pingdom HQ and beyond we’ve compiled a list of our suggestions for the must-have essentials for DreamHack besides the computer, of course. The clothes, computer accessories and more you just shouldn’t be without.

We collect a lot of data every day. In 2012, our monitoring system registered almost 65 million downtimes, we stored 106 billion monitoring results, and we handled other types of data for 300,000+ customers.

Something we’re now using for a small part of all the data we process and store each day is ZFS and its snapshot feature. So far it’s proven to be a reliable, fast, and flexible solution, and we think this is something you also would want to consider for your infrastructure.

The world of computing was very different back in the 1960s. For one, there were not that many computers around. The Digital computer census for April 1962 tallied only “14,000 installations of digital computers” in the U.S. So the computers were few but they certainly weren’t small, as you can see in these computer ads from around 50 years ago.

Having looked at hundreds of ads working on this article, we can’t help but feel that the computer industry back then really could have used Don Draper and his Mad Men (and women). At least some of these ads would probably have turned out quite differently if Don was involved. What do you think?

At Pingdom we love the web and our quest is to make it faster and more reliable. This is something we want to share with others and yesterday this passion took us to the first Web Performance Meetup in Stockholm.

It was a great evening with presentations about the worst performing websites in Sweden, Real User Monitoring (RUM), and more. We already look forward to the next meetup, and here’s a quick roundup of what happened yesterday.

Imagine this scenario: You have just received an alert that your site is down and you log in to your Pingdom account to figure out what’s up (or down, in most cases). There you can see that your site is still down, and you now need to figure out what’s gone wrong.

Fear not, because that’s where the Root Cause Analysis comes in. It offers a set of diagnostic tools, which can help you figure out what caused an outage. In this article, we show you where you can find the Root Cause Analysis, and how to use it.

You have to look hard for a company that makes cooler software than Panic. At least if you’re a Mac user, titles like Coda, Prompt, and Transmit should ring a bell.

Panic’s latest app is Status Board. It turns your iPad into a highly customizable dashboard. There are many widgets that come with the app, including a clock, a calendar, email, Twitter, RSS, and more.

We’ve seen this before, but there’s a twist: you can also make your own widgets for Status Board. Using the Do-It-Yourself widget we created a very simple example of how you can display the status of your Pingdom checks in your very own widget on your iPad.

If you are a web developer, you should definitely check out jsDelivr and JSter.

JSter is a catalog of over 1,100 JavaScript libraries and tools for web development, where users can rate contributions, and share their experience with others. jsDelivr is a free CDN (Content Delivery Network) where any web developer can host their files, including CSS, fonts, JavaScript, jQuery plugins, etc. Currently almost 600 projects are hosted on jsDelivr.

To find out more about these two projects, we interviewed Dmitriy Akulov (representing jsDelivr) and Juho Vepsäläinen (representing JSter).

Where is your website hosted – in the country where you live or somewhere else? Regardless of where you live, chances are pretty good your site is hosted in the United States. According to a recent study, 42% of the world’s top 1 million sites are hosted in the U.S.

But what percentage of sites with a given country code top-level (ccTLD) domain, such as .se for Sweden or .jp for Japan, are hosted in that particular country? As it turns out, people in Germany, South Korea, and Vietnam are the most likely to choose homegrown web hosting.

With Pingdom’s Real User Monitoring (RUM) service, you can know exactly how your visitors experience your website. It gives you insight into your website’s performance and helps you answer questions like, how does your website really perform from a specific country, device, or web browser.

Today we’re releasing a simple tool with which you can display the real user performance of any website, not just the ones you monitor. Think of it as a sample of what the full Real User Monitoring service can do.

The Real User Monitoring bookmarklet is free and easy to install. Here’s what it does and how to get started.

One of the objectives we had when creating the Team plan, which we introduced recently, was to offer more to customers with considerable website monitoring needs. The Team plan includes more checks, more page views for Real User Monitoring, and more functionality.

Something unique to the Team plan is tagging of checks. By adding tags to your checks, you can organize and sort your checks in new ways. You can also get additional information about the site or server that the check monitors. Let’s have a look at how tags can help you manage your Pingdom account.