SolarWinds Observability SaaS now offers synthetic transaction monitoring

As you most likely know, we recently experienced two outages. This post is an update on what we are currently doing to avoid this from happening again and also what we will be doing next.

To make it clear, we already had redundancy in software, machines and network, which were to take over if anything went wrong with our system. Unfortunately, this didn’t work as expected since our issue was one step further down in the chain.

The issue we have been facing is related to our virtualized infrastructure and the storage systems that it uses. So this is what our entire team is focusing on in our short term and upcoming fixes.

In less than a week, we’ve experienced two outages. In fact, these two outages combined have been the worst since the company was founded in 2007.

We wanted to take this opportunity to give you an update on the situation and tell you where we go from here. The current status is that all our core websites and services are up and running as they should. This includes the monitoring you have set up of your websites, alerts, our API etc.

There is so much happening on the Internet during a year that it’s impossible to capture it all in a blog post, but we’re going to give it a shot anyway. How many emails were sent during 2012? How many domains are there? What’s the most popular web browser? How many Internet users are there? These are some of the questions we’ll answer for you.

To bring you these answers, we’ve gone to the ends of the web – wherever that is – and back again, and compiled a list of truly fascinating facts about the year that was. Some of the numbers are snapshots taken during the year, others cover the entire period. Either way, they all contribute to giving us a better understanding of Internet in 2012. Enjoy!

Today we’ve released the brand new Transaction Monitor feature to all Pingdom customers. This new check type is immediately available in your my.pingdom.com control panel.

With a Transaction Monitor check, you can make sure that multi-step user interactions on your websites are working as they should. Since more and more websites depend on multiple web pages and scripts working together, it is not always enough to monitor individual resources.

Simply put, with the Transaction Monitor, you define a series of interactions to be performed on your website. Pingdom then performs these at a regular interval using a web browser, just as if a person was visiting the site.

Västerås, Sweden ― January 14, 2013 ― Pingdom, a leading global provider of website uptime and performance monitoring services, today announced the Pingdom Transaction Monitor, a new type of website monitoring check. With the new check type, Pingdom customers can define multi-step actions that should be performed on their website, such as searching or filling out a form. A web browser then performs these actions at a regular interval, just like a real user, to make sure that important functions on their site are working, and that they’re working fast.

This coming Monday, January 14, we will release a new feature, the Pingdom Transaction Monitor check type. With it, all Pingdom customers will be able to monitor complex multi-step website interactions.

We will of course share all the information about the Transaction Monitor on Monday. In preparation for the official launch, we would like to invite you to take part in a live Q&A broadcast session taking place on Monday at 18:00 (6pm) CET, 9:00 (9am) PST.

Yesterday we sent out a box of chocolates each to all creative, geeky and cool companies around Västerås where our HQ located. We put together a small website (in Swedish) where we declare that 2013 should be the year when everyone hang out more and be more social in general.

You might think that the box of chocolates was an effort to gain the upper hand ahead of Beach 2013, but no, sadly we need a little more head start than that 😉

We’re fast approaching the release of the Pingdom Transaction Monitor, a new type of check you will soon be able to add to your Pingdom account. In preparation for this, we brought you a how-to article last week and today we bring you a cheat sheet.

It’s now about a month since we launched the beta of our Real User Monitoring (RUM) service. The response has been great, and we’d like to say a big thank you to everyone who has signed up for the beta and given us feedback.

That feedback we’ve taken to heart and incorporated as much as possible into the final release. As the launch of our RUM service is drawing closer, we wanted to address some questions regarding how it compares to the synthetic monitoring we already offer.

We announced the beta for the Pingdom Transaction Monitor recently, and we’ve been expanding it to include more users. There’s been plenty of helpful feedback, much of what’s already been put into the pipeline for the future. The Transaction Monitor is on a fast development cycle, where the input from beta users is critical, so we appreciate all the help.

In case you have not yet tried the Transaction Monitor (and you can still sign up to be a part of the beta) we wanted to give you an idea of how to use use it. We think it’s a very easy-to-use, versatile and powerful tool, which can help you monitor multi-step transactions spanning several pages, scripts, etc.

As we say happy birthday to Linus Torvalds today, he should be a happy chap because Linux is now the dominating OS on consumer computing devices. According to IDC and Goldman Sachs, as reported by the Seattle Times, Android (which is based on Linux) runs on 42% of all consumer computing devices.

How can that be?

The year 2012 is coming to an end, and 2013 is waiting around the corner. It’s time for a quick recap of some of the best and most interesting posts we’ve published this year. This is of course just a small percentage of all the posts we’ve produced this year, so you may very well have missed some of them, especially if you’re not a regular reader.

Just about 2 hours ago, we started to send out our best wishes for the holiday season to our customers. Unfortunately a really embarrassing mistake was made, which affected a limited number of our customers.

Because of a loop in an email-script (not a part of the software that is the base of Pingdom services) gone bad, we managed to send out more than one email to 5,511 of our customers. By mistake, we also included a limited number of our other customer’s email addresses in the To: field of those emails. The exact number of emails that was sent before we stopped the script was 5,511. The person that received the most duplicate emails received 11 of them, and the number of email addresses that was included in the To: field was 5,511. That’s not all our 280,000 customers, but certainly more than bad enough.

We’re approaching the end of 2012, and it’s been an exciting year for us at Pingdom and for our customers. We moved into a brand new office at the beginning of the year, saw record-breaking customer and sales numbers, a bunch of new colleagues joined us, and much more.

In short, because of you, our customer, it’s been a fantastic year. As a way to say thank you, and to take stock of where we are, we wanted to tell you some things about the year that has been.

Today, we take another important step on our quest for making the web faster and more reliable by going live with the Pingdom Real User Monitoring beta program. After we announced that we were working on our RUM service, the response from you guys has been tremendous, and we’re delighted that so many of you want to try it out and be a part of shaping it.

Shortly after 9am CET today, Friday December 7, 2012, some of our systems started to experience downtime. This included our pingdom.com homepage and the customer control panel at my.pingdom.com. All systems have now been restored and are operating at normal capacity and functionality.

Monitoring of our customer’s websites was not affected, but alerts, unfortunately, were delayed. We are as passionate about uptime as our customers are, and this sort of thing should not happen. Since this is a rare occurrence for us, we want to take this opportunity to explain what happened, at least insofar as we know right now.

With so much happening in the mobile space today, we’re excited to announce that we’ve added a team that is dedicated to all things mobile to the growing Pingdom family.

This will help us on our quest for making the web a faster and more reliable place, regardless of what device is used to access a website.

A couple of weeks ago we announced the Pingdom Transaction Monitor beta. The interest has been amazing, and we’d like to thank everyone that has tweeted about it, emailed us about it, and registered their interest in taking part in the beta.

In the very first round we only sent out beta invites to a select few customers. With their help we’ve now further developed the Transaction Monitor and we’re now ready to let more customers try it out.

Today is the 6th annual Blue Beanie Day and we join web fans from around the world in wearing blue hats. We first thought that we will all look like Smurfs in the Pingdom HQ today, but Smurfs (at least most of them) have white hats, not blue.

We at Pingdom want to make the web faster and more reliable, and working with web standards can certainly be a key part of accomplishing this. Pingdom wants to be a good web citizens and make sure our sites work and display correctly for as many users as possible.

We believe in making our products as easy as possible to use, but we also believe in offering first-rate support to you, our customer, when you need to ask us something. Today, we’re announcing the latest addition to our frontline support and that is an FAQ.

You share many of your questions with other customers, and we’ve been collecting these for some time now. We’ve sorted through them, prioritized, and written answers. Now, this is all available to you in the FAQ, which you can find at support.pingdom.com. There, you can click your way to an answer or simply type something into the search box. Either way, we’ve loaded up the FAQ with some of the most common questions we receive, and the answers, of course.