Announcing SolarWinds Observability

It’s with great excitement and anticipation we’re taking off for Velocity Europe later today. If you happen to be attending Velocity Europe, make sure you stop us for a chat! Look for yellow and black Pingdom shirts with Currently on Duty written on them as well as Born to Hack badges.

Starting tomorrow, you will be able to find a part of the Pingdom team at the Velocity Europe venue in London, attending presentations and workshops, talking to fellow webops and web performance people, and just simply taking in the atmosphere.

At Pingdom we pride ourselves in making it easy for anyone to monitor the uptime and performance of websites and servers. We are very passionate about what we do and we want to make sure we include you, our customer, when we map out the future of our products.

Yesterday, we showed you a bunch of new cool and shiny hardware that will be used for a new product. Today we’d like to invite you to take part in shaping the next step in our quest to make the Internet a faster and more reliable place: RUM.

You remember floppy disks, don’t you? Those truly floppy (hence the name) disks of thin plastic, which we all used to store and transfer files with before we had the Internet and USB thumb drives.

Today in 1930, one of the most significant people ever in the computer storage industry, was born. Alan Shugart sadly passed away in 2006, but he leaves an impressive legacy of work, starting out at IBM and later cofounding Seagate. We wanted, in his memory, to take a look at the first floppy drive.

A lot of things are happening at Pingdom, thanks to you, our dedicated customers. Looking back at the past six months or so we can note that we’ve become a LIR, migrated more than 250k users to a new platform, launched a new control panel, and much more.

That’s not even mentioning the new office we moved into earlier this year and all the great new geeky additions to the team. But we’re really only getting started, and we wanted to give a look at the future.

Research In Motion, makers of BlackBerry smartphones and related products, has not been in the headlines much with positive news in recent years. But the total number of BlackBerry users worldwide has, despite the bad news, kept growing, at least until now.

With the new platform, BlackBerry 10, around the corner, promising new functionality and updated handsets, is there still hope for RIM? You can decide for yourself after going through these figures.

Today, the Pingdom team deployed a software upgrade to some of our monitoring probes. Despite thorough testing, this upgrade contained a malfunction that led to false down alerts being sent to a portion of our customers.

Even if the issue affected monitoring for less than 90 minutes for a limited number of customers, it’s of course frustrating if you were one of them. We take a lot of pride in delivering a reliable service and this doesn’t represent what Pingdom stands for.

Let us first stress how rare it is that something like this happens at Pingdom. In fact, this is the first time a similar occurrence has struck us. That said, we want to take this opportunity to provide information about what happened, present what actions we’ve already taken, as well as tell you how we move forward.

Continuing a string of recent hires, we’re today very happy to welcome interaction designer Magnus Leo to the Pingdom team. We’re excited to find out what he really means when he says “I make things interactive.”

Musicmetric, an online music analytics firm, has published a report, which it claims to be “the most in-depth study ever of the global digital music landscape.” In the report, we find a list of the 10 countries in the world where the most music has been illegally downloaded during the first half of 2012.

But the report only lists total downloads. What happens if we, instead, put the number of downloads in relation to the size of the population and the number of Internet users?

We have in several articles recently written about how the top brands in the world are using social media, like Facebook and Twitter. That peaked our interest in these global giants so we decided to start following their web presence as well to see if there’s possibly more to find.

With Coca-Cola in the lead, followed by IBM, Microsoft, and Google, this is a list of some of the biggest companies in the world, and we think you will find it particularly interesting to follow how they perform online.

Pingdom has studied the uptime of the official websites of all 290 municipalities in Sweden during July, and we can now present that only 17% of the sites scored a perfect 100% uptime. In this study, we also identify the 20 municipalities with the worst uptime record in July.

It’s clear on the basis of this study that website uptime is something that many municipalities in Sweden continue to struggle with. Availability of their websites and other online services is a key issue that needs to be dealt with, as more and more local governments around the world, including municipalities, take to the Internet for communicating with residents and conducting business.

Pingdom now welcomes another Born to Hack ninja to the team. Markus Liljedahl will be working with frontend development and quality assurance. His background in both networking and programming will serve him perfectly in his new job.

Today we’re very excited to welcome the latest addition to the Pingdom team, John Karlsson. He joins Pingdom as a designer, and he will put his experience and talents, focused on digital design, into working on Pingdom’s products and other projects.

Today, just about all computers have hard drives. In fact, in the last quarter of 2011, global hard drive shipments reached approximately 125 million units. But what was the situation like back in the 1970s? Personal computers were (almost) unheard of, and computers were typically large as rooms and run by guys in white lab coats.

Aren’t you curious to find out just how big the global market for hard drives was back then? Let’s find out.

Visopsys (VISual OPerating SYStem) is an alternative operating system for PC-compatible computers, developed almost exclusively by one person, Andy McLaughlin, since its inception in 1997.

Andy is a 30-something programmer from Canada, who, via Boston and San Jose ended up in London, UK, where he spends much of his spare time developing Visopsys,

We had the great fortune to catch up with Andy via email and ask him questions about Visopsys, why he started the project in the first place, and where is it going in the future.

Almost 50 years ago, a small team at the Italian company Olivetti managed to do what no one had done before them; they created a computer small enough to fit on a desk, and could be used by regular people. It was the Programma 101, what many consider to be the world’s first personal computer.

Here’s a number to make your jaw drop; Facebook users are posting 300 million new photos every day. This is an incredible amount of photos going into Facebook, the equivalent of an entire Flickr every three weeks.

Facebook stores and processes so many photos that they’ve had to build their very own software (Haystack) to be able to handle it.

300 million photos per day is impressive, but what is really mind-blowing is how quickly the amount of photos accumulate at that rate.

The Indian government has issued a temporary restriction on the number of SMS messages that can be sent in a day (no more than 5 per subscriber). The latest information is that this restriction will last for two weeks, and affects all of India. If you live there, you are probably well aware of this by now.

This drastic measure was put in place by the Indian government to curb the spread of rumors and inflammatory material concerning recent violence in Assam, India. Many websites have also been blocked for the same reason. It is a complicated situation, but basically the Indian government is doing this in an attempt to limit civil unrest.

We’re Swedes, so it’s difficult for us to comment on this from the outside. What we are concerned about, however, is the technical side effect of this move.

Do you know how old the average Twitter or Facebook user is? Do you know what share of Reddit’s users are women? We could go on and on; when it comes to social network demographics, the questions are endless. This article is going to answer those questions for you, showing you the age and gender distribution on 24 of today’s most popular social networks and online communities.

Today we’re very excited to welcome another backend developer to the Pingdom team. Johan Sköld comes from Västerås, Sweden, where the Pingdom HQ is located. With his experience in performance-focused programming and “just get it done” attitude, he will be a great addition to the Pingdom team.

On August 1, the classic Commodore 64 computer turned 30 years old. That’s a long time in the world of technology, but the C64 has turned into the little computer that could, with lots of people still using it, websites dedicated to it, and more.

We wanted to pay our own respects to the Commodore 64 as well as all the dedicated users that have used the computer over the years. So we rounded up a number of photos of the C64.

The really cool thing is that these are all photos taken way back when it actually happened, when the Commodore 64 was new, in the 1980s.