SolarWinds Observability SaaS now offers synthetic transaction monitoring

The recent world-wide financial chaos has reminded us how sensitive the stock market is, with sharp up- and downturns. Now imagine the reaction of the stock traders if they couldn’t trade at all. It doesn’t happen very often, but it does happen.

Stock exchanges usually have strict SLAs and high demands on availability, but they can’t completely avoid downtime. We have gathered up some of the major stock exchange outages that have occurred so far this decade (i.e. since 2000 and onward) and listed when and why they happened.

Baidu, which is China’s equivalent to Google, has been unavailable since 09:50 this morning, Central European Time. That is more than five hours and counting as of this writing.

The problem might be related to the so-called Great Firewall of China, since it seems like the website is accessible from within China (we performed a test with a proxy server located within China). However, none of the Pingdom test servers in Europe or North America are able to access the site.

Match.com, arguably the world’s most famous dating website, was unavailable for more than one-and-a-half hours yesterday. The downtime started at 08:02 in the morning, Central European Time, and lasted exactly one hour and 37 minutes according to our monitoring of the website.

Some of the luxury computers out there have designs that are quite extreme, and some even put Apple to shame when it comes to elegance. These computers are made with expensive materials, bling, strange shapes, and prices ranging from expensive to insane.

If you fancy paying up to a million dollars for a luxury computer, here you go! The rest of us will probably just enjoy looking at the pictures. 🙂

And yes, one of the computers in this post actually does cost a million US dollars. Ouch…

Jeff Dean from Google recently held a lecture at the University of Washington which is highly interesting to anyone curious about the current and future challenges that face companies that operate computing on such a large scale as Google. And of course, it will give you some nice insights into how Google does things.

Since this is from Google’s perspective there are also several aspects specific to search companies, SaaS and distributed computing. It’s a very interesting lecture, easy to follow and well worth the time (it runs almost exactly an hour). You can download it or stream it from here.

It’s not exactly a big secret that we here at Pingdom are complete and utter geeks (which we freely admit). That’s why we love what we’ve seen in the way of pumpkin designs now that Halloween is around the corner. There are pumpkins designed as robots, computers, nice IT logos, gaming icons and more.

We have collected some of them in this post. Let your inner geek loose and keep reading. 🙂

The domain name market is often likened to the real estate market, and a significant share of all domain names out there have been bought by people hoping to later sell them on for a greater price than what they paid for them.

The question is, how many of today’s domain names are actually held by domain name speculators?

Verisign is the registry handling the .com and .net top level domains, and they recently released statistics that can help us shed some light on this question.

Many of the blogs that have a huge following today go back to much more humble beginnings. This post is a look at how they got started and what they looked like in their early days, compared to today.

All of the websites presented below are among the 15 most popular blogs according to Technorati. We relied on the Internet Archive to get screenshots of the old versions of these websites.

It has been widely reported that Google’s Gmail has been having problems lately. Now it seems like Microsoft perhaps had a hand in spreading the news coverage, fanning the flames a bit.

Here is a quote from an InformationWeek article about the recent Gmail outages:

That didn’t stop a Microsoft spokesperson from reaching out to me to make sure I was aware of the current Google Apps problems. The spokesperson said to me in an e-mail, “The Gmail outage was reported (and buried) on a discussion board yesterday and a solution is expected (but not promised) by EOD today — 24 hrs later.”

He implied that the story wasn’t getting the press that it should.

So, basically, Microsoft’s PR people are trying to make sure that Google’s trouble gets as much attention as possible.

We were curious if this happens a lot. Do companies often contact journalists to point out the failings of their competitors?

We fired off this question to Eric Zeman, the journalist at InformationWeek who wrote the article we quoted from above, and here is what he told us:

We may be screwing up Mother Nature, but she is getting back at us in her own way. And she knows we love electricity and the Internet.

Though a lot of outages are man-made, there are a huge amount of power outages directly caused by nature every year. Causes include storms and hurricanes, earthquakes, flooding, and more often than not, animals too curious for their own best.

We had a look at some of the nature-made power outages so far in 2008, focusing mostly on the United States and North America, and how power outages have affected data centers and ISPs.

Wikipedia, the über-popular online encyclopedia, went down briefly today. It was unavailable for about 15 minutes, starting at 11:17 CET according to our Pingdom monitoring.

The service was responding with HTTP error 503 (service unavailable) and displayed an error page stating that the Wikimedia servers were experiencing a technical problem (screenshot below).

Wikimedia.org was also down, indicating that Wikimedia had some form of general problem that likely affected all its websites, not just Wikipedia.

ZDNet has posted a short walkthrough of HP’s portable data center, POD, which we assume is set to compete with other container data centers from for example Sun and Rackable.

Want one? It’ll only cost you just over $1 million. Without servers.

Google has so many different products that it becomes pretty hard to keep track of them over time. Some are worth being reminded of, though, because there are several useful Google products that are flying below the radar, unknown to the vast majority of users out there.

How do we know this? A couple of weeks ago we here at Pingdom wrote about Google’s tendency to keep many of its products in perpetual beta, and while doing the research for that post we kept finding Google products that we either didn’t know about or had forgotten that they existed.

So, we decided to share these with you.

This post lists 10 interesting Google products that you are likely to either have forgotten about or simply never knew existed.

Aptimize has released a product called Runtime Page Optimizer. The software runs on your webserver and applies performance optimizations to pages before they are delivered to the browser.

Aptimize uses many of the optimizations that Steve Souders describes in his book High Performance Web Sites and the best practices from YSlow.

Spam can be more than a mere inconvenience, as tens of thousands of Virgin Media DSL customers in the UK can testify to after having been unable to access their email for days last week due to what is said to have been a spam attack. Virgin Media uses Tucows’s OpenSRS email service.

The Virgin Media DSL service has about 200,000 customers. Approximately half of these were affected.

OpenOffice.org, the open source office suite, launched version 3.0 yesterday. The demand for the new version seems to have taken OpenOffice.org off guard because their website hasn’t been able to handle the load, as has been reported from several places around the Web.

In the meantime, OpenOffice.org has put up a simplified static page with download links, but even that hasn’t been enough to ensure the website’s stability. As of this writing, the website fails to load, though we managed to access it earlier to take the screenshot you see below.

Tomorrow, on October 14, Apple will hold a press event where the “spotlight turns to notebooks.” As usual there have been lots of speculation and rumors about what new products Apple will be announcing, but we won’t list all the rumors here since they can be found elsewhere.

However, we thought this would be a good time to remind all Apple fans of our Apple Store status widgets that checks if the Apple Store is up or not. If Apple does what they usually do, they will take down the Apple Store for a while before opening it again updated with the new products.

There are two widgets, one you can include on your website and one you can run on your OS X desktop.

Early on Friday (Oct 10) a power outage hit the Novell office and data center in Nürnberg, Germany, effectively taking down several services used by the popular Linux distribution OpenSUSE, including the download redirector (used for downloads and software updates if we understand it correctly) and the mailing lists.

Though the building had two power lines, both failed, and the power company had to dig up the cables to repair them.

LinkedIn, the popular social network for professionals, has had several periods of downtime lately. The last one came last evening (US time), and lasted just over an hour.

The website’s recurring availability issues are making us wonder if LinkedIn has perhaps started to run into scaling issues. According to their website, LinkedIn currently has more than 25 million users, compared to 14 million a year ago. That’s almost a doubling of their user base in just a year.

The infamous Blue Screen of Death (BSOD) probably hasn’t escaped the notice of anyone who has used a computer in the last decade or so. If you haven’t seen it on your own PC, you probably know someone it has happened to.

There is actually a ridiculous amount of BSOD photos to be found around the Web. And not just of PCs. As this post will show you, the blue error screen seems to show up everywhere, and often in highly unexpected locations.

This is a collection of some of the very best ones we could find. Enjoy!