SolarWinds Observability SaaS now offers synthetic transaction monitoring

Do you lie awake at night expecting aliens to invade our planet? Perhaps you have nightmares after watching “Mars attacks!” or think Jell-O is now yuck after seeing “The green slime.”

Chances are, regardless of whether you are anxious about aliens or not, that it’s not something you think about when you buy a new computer or gadget. For example, have you ever thought about whether the warranty of your brand new computer is valid if (when?) the aliens arrive?

If that’s you, you should definitely not expect Taiwanese computer, component, and gadget manufacturer Asus to help.

There’s no denying that Google Chrome continues to be the darling of the web browser market. And as we predicted in July last year, Chrome overtook Firefox around November 2011.

So now the question is, when will Google also wrestle down Internet Explorer, and become the undisputed king of the browser world? In December 2011, Chrome 15 became the most popular browser in the world, beating Internet Explorer 8, but if you combine all IE versions, Microsoft still holds the number 1 spot.

Equipped with the latest web browser statistics from StatCounter, we set out to see when Chrome is likely to achieve more than 50% market share.

Want to see how your favorite US sports site is doing, if it has a perfect 100% uptime score or not? If you want to check the latest scores and it isn’t working, could it be a problem with your computer or connection, or the site? We’ve got the solution for you!

For some time now we’ve been monitoring 34 major US sports and news sites related to sports. Our recent articles on the Super Bowl are a result of that monitoring.

Now you can look at how these sites are doing yourself on the public reports page for this list of US sports websites.

Who has not used Google Maps? Raise your hand! Since the launch 7 years ago, Google Maps has become the de facto map service that users around the world go to for all their mapping needs.

As we say Happy Birthday to Google Maps, read on to find out some of the critical milestones in its history, and some amazing numbers and statistics.

Who has not used Google Maps? Raise your hand! Since the launch 7 years ago, Google Maps has become the de facto map service that users around the world go to for all their mapping needs.

As we say Happy Birthday to Google Maps, read on to find out some of the critical milestones in its history, and some amazing numbers and statistics.

In 2010, there were just over 1 million secure Internet websites worldwide. Almost half of those, or 446,992 to be exact, were located in the United States.

But in which country can we find the most secure websites in relation to population? The answer may surprise you.

The New England Patriots held what seemed to be a commanding lead (17-15) with five minutes left of Super Bowl XLVI last night. But the New York Giants came back and managed to win with 21-17.

As exciting as the game sounds, we missed the whole thing, instead spending our time watching the Superbowl.com website.

It turned out to be a rather dull thing to do because the site held up well and there was no downtime at all. The response time also didn’t give away anything significant in terms of online Super Bowl traffic.

As Super Bowl 46 is approaching, fans will flock to the Lucas Oil Stadium in Indianapolis, Indiana, and to TV sets around the world to follow the New York Giants battle it out with the New England Patriots.

Kickoff is scheduled for 6:30EST on Sunday, February 5, and we’re already monitoring Superbowl.com to see how the site will handle the event.

What team will win Super Bowl 46? How will the site cope? We can only wait to find out.

Every Friday we bring you a collection of links to places on the web that we find particularly newsworthy, interesting, entertaining, and topical. We try to focus on some particular area or topic each week, but in general we will cover Internet, web development, networking, performance, and other geeky topics.h

This week we bring you a collection of articles focusing on cloud, with a few other topics thrown in to boot.

Out of the 59 US-based e-commerce sites we monitored during the holiday season last year 28 scored a perfect 100% uptime for December.

Whether this helped spur on the booming sales in the US, we don’t know, but retail e-commerce spending in the US reached $37.2 billion for the November to December 2011 period. That was an increase of 15% from the same period in 2010.

We decided to dig into the numbers for these e-commerce sites to see how well they did in terms of uptime and performance. After massaging the data coming from our Pingdom probes, it turns out that the sites overall performed well during December 2011 in terms of uptime, but response time was an issue for several sites.

Want to be able to download a DVD worth of data in about 38 minutes? It may not seem very impressive, but that’s with the average Internet speed in South Korea, according to the latest “State of the Internet” report by Akamai.

Covering Q3 2011, the report again puts South Korea at the top of the list of countries with the fastest Internet connections. The country scored an average connection speed of 16.7 Mbps in Q3 2011.

Microsoft Windows Vista was released into retail on January 30, 2007, and there’s not been many nice words said about it since. It suffered from being incompatible with much of existing hardware and software, problems with drivers, imposing annoying security procedures on users, and more.

It seemed like everyone loved to hate poor Vista, enough to earn it a spot on the list of “Top ten terrible tech products.”

So today we can say happy fifth birthday to Windows Vista. But what does it look like around the world when it comes to the use of Vista? Is anyone still using the much-maligned OS?

With Valentine’s Day approaching – it’s happening February 14, you know – we want to give everyone the opportunity to be a little extra lovie-dovie and cheesy to the geek in their life.

Now we know that many of you will flock to ThinkGeek or some other geeky store to pick up some more or less well thought-out Valentine’s gifts, but that’s not good enough for us.

With just a simple tweet, you can win a gift certificate to be spent on flowers and chocolates for your geek this Valentine.

In our never ending quest to provide you with the best uptime and performance monitoring service, we now present you with our brand new app for the Google Chrome web browser.

It is, of course, completely free!

With the app installed in your Chrome browser, you get easy access to your Pingdom account from Chrome’s Apps page. Chrome accounted for just over 40% of the traffic to Pingdom.com over the last 30 days, so we hope you will find this interesting and useful.

On January 27, 2010, Steve Jobs took to the stage at the Yerba Buena Center for the Arts in San Francisco. The anticipation was that he would unveil Apple’s long-rumored tablet device.

The headline for the event was “Come see our latest creation.” That turned out to be the first iPad.

And like it or not, the world of technology – perhaps the world in general – has not been the same since.

China has come a long way fast in the world of supercomputers and now occupies the number two and number three spots on the Top 500 list.

Now the country has taken another major step forward by being only the third country in the world, after Japan and the USA, to launch a supercomputer made out of processors made in the country.

Just a few days ago, the Sunway Bluelight, a supercomputer that uses processors designed and built in China, was put into operation.

When you arrive at a site that asks you to register for an account before you can access certain content or functionality, does that drive you away?

A recent research report shows that a site that requires users to register does just that, drives users away. On the flipside, the same report shows that about half of all users are attracted by personalization capabilities on a site.

So, on the one hand, we don’t want to register but, on the other, we want personalization.

How can you deal with that in a way that finds a balance between the two? Perhaps social login is the answer.

Have you ever scanned a QR code? If you have, did you get a discount on something? Did it reveal some cool information? Did it give you an offer you just couldn’t refuse?

It’s clear that QR codes are increasing in popularity, but to be truly as viral and useful as many companies hope they will, they have to become more useful.

We have an example from the Pingdom office today of a QR code that doesn’t deliver any value to the customer at all. Read on to find out more.

We have pointed out China’s amazing potential before on this blog, and we have also made detailed comparisons between China and the USA.

But with over 1.3 billion people, China has “only” 77 million smartphones, which, per capita, is far behind many other countries around the world, including the USA.

So let’s be honest, haven’t you wondered what if China had the same number of smartphones per capita as the USA?

Let’s play a game of “what if.”

Every single day we’re giving away a 1-year Basic Account package, worth almost $120, to one lucky person that has a chance to walk away with this catch.

What we do is that at a different time each day, we post a message on Twitter with a link containing a discount code.

The code entitles the first person that applies it to a transaction, to a 100% discount on a 1-year Basic Package, worth $119.40.