SolarWinds Observability SaaS now offers synthetic transaction monitoring

When you think about outsourcing (especially offshore outsourcing), usually India comes foremost to mind. The country has been the premier outsourcing destination for years, providing services such as software development and call centers to companies in the West. Though there are other countries gunning for the profitable outsourcing contracts as well, for example the Philippines, India is considered a dominant player.

Now it seems like a new threat to India’s dominance is rising on the African east coast. Kenya is about to get a significant boost to its Internet infrastructure, and since most people there speak English they have a good opportunity to set up for example call center operations. (Most of the population in Kenya is bilingual, the official languages being English and Swahili.)

The Australian airline Jetstar suffered from an extended system outage on Sunday. The outage brought the check-in system offline, forcing Jetstar to switch to manual check-ins which caused significant delays for its passengers all over Australia.

According to Sky News, the outage lasted for about two-and-a-half hours, though it would take overnight work to fully restore the system and have everything on schedule Monday morning.

Ever since the iPhone launched here in Sweden we have been in love with it. Considering that we here at Pingdom deal with servers, networks and the Internet on a daily basis, we have evaluated a lot of iPhone apps aimed specifically at sysadmins and webmasters.

In our opinion, the iPhone can be extremely useful to administrators responsible for keeping servers, networks and websites up and running. Loaded with the right applications, it becomes an on-the-move toolbox for when work needs to be done but there’s no computer nearby.

This article lists 12 applications that will turn an iPhone into a veritable Swiss Army knife for any sysadmin, webmaster or network technician.

Six Apart’s hosted blogging service TypePad was down for one hour today. Typepad is one of the largest blogging platforms in the world, competing with the likes of Blogger.com and Wordpress.com.

According to our monitoring of Typepad.com (via our Pingdom uptime monitoring service), the website itself was unavailable for 59 minutes, starting at 07:37 a.m. CET. A short 3-minute outage followed 10 minutes later, but the website has been stable after that.

The Typepad.com website uses the same platform as the TypePad blogs, so it’s likely that all blogs were affected to some degree.

The popular tech blog Digital Inspiration just posted an independent survey of website monitoring services. And guess what? Pingdom came out on top.

The survey compared how quickly and reliably different monitoring services alert you if your website goes down. This is a very important metric for webmasters. The sooner you know that your website has gone down, the sooner you can do something about it.

Amazon has announced that they are adding support for Windows and MS SQL Server to their Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2).

We have been waiting for Amazon to announce something like this for quite some time now. It was bound to happen sooner or later. The feature is currently in closed beta, but Amazon promises that you will be able to use Windows Server instances in EC2 before the end of 2008.

Wikipedia was down twice yesterday (September 30).

The first and longest outage lasted half an hour and started just after 4 p.m. CET (10 a.m. EST), and the second one was a short ten-minute outage a couple of hours later. In total, the website was unavailable for approximately 40 minutes.

Facebook passed MySpace in worldwide traffic a while ago, but MySpace has kept dominating the US market. Well, it looks like that is about to change really soon.

Within a month (or two at the most), if the current trend holds, Facebook will have more daily visitors than MySpace in the US according to Google Trends for Websites.

We have dug up a very telling graph, and also delve into some speculation about where Facebook is getting its users from.

As you may have noticed if you’re a regular reader of this blog, we launched a new design last week. We hope you like it.

Aside from the general visual design change, there are some other new things as well…

For example, now you can write your own guest posts.

On Monday, the US House of Representatives rejected a $700 billion emergency package for the US financial system. After the bill was rejected, the House website was so overwhelmed with visitors seeking information or wanting to email their representatives that the whole website effectively crashed.

This post is about the desktop operating systems that fly under the radar of most people. We are definitely not talking about Windows, Mac OS X or Linux, or even BSD or Solaris. There are much less mainstream options out there for the OS-curious.

These alternative operating systems are usually developed either by enthusiasts or small companies (or both), and there are more of them than you might expect. There are even more than we have included in this article, though we think this is a good selection of the more interesting ones and we have focused specifically on desktop operating systems.

Currently if you go to Cisco.com you will be greeted by a strange sight. It appears that all of the letters “t” have been removed from their text and source code. Not only does it make the text look funny but it has also changed the source code so no styles or scripts are working.

On Monday, September 29, starting at 12:01 a.m. PST Microsoft will take Xbox Live offline for maintenance for up to 24 hours. The maintenance will affect Xbox Live and some parts of the xbox.com website.

According to the Merriam-Webster dictionary, a beta is “a nearly complete prototype of a product.” In other words, a not-yet-finished product.

Google is known for keeping their products in beta (much) longer than most other companies. But exactly how many of their products are in beta? When we here at Pingdom investigated this, it turned out that out of the 49 Google products we could find, 22 are in beta. That’s 45%!

Note that we didn’t include any Google Labs products since they can be considered to be a “playground” for future products. If we had included those, the percent of beta products would have been much higher (57%).

On Tuesday (September 23), the rather infamous BitTorrent tracker The Pirate Bay was down for a continuous 3 hours and 11 minutes. The site went down at 2:44 p.m. CET (08:44 a.m. EDT).

The site mytestbox.com has published a interesting article called Cloud computing, grid computing, utility computing – list of top providers.

It contains a good list of companies and information if you are researching cloud services.

High Scalability recently posted a monster of an article with facts about how latency directly affects the bottom line of businesses on the Web, and best of all, plenty of advice on how websites can go about to reduce latency.

CERN’s Large Hadron Collider (LHC) will be producing roughly 15 petabytes of data each year (15,000,000,000,000,000 bytes). In other words, the LHC is not only huge in physical size (filling a 17-mile long underground path), but it will produce enormous amounts of data for researchers to bite into.

CERN seems to be well-equipped to handle the data from the gigantic particle accelerator when you take a look at their data center.

Back in 1996 the Web was starting to gain some serious momentum, but it was still just a few years old. Now in 2008, looking 12 years back into the past of the Web can be a both nostalgic and entertaining experience.

We have used the good old WayBack Machine (a.k.a the Internet Archive) to track down screenshots of what websites looked like back in 1996-97.

We stumbled upon this very weird picture on the front page of the Swedish IDG News website next to an article about how businesses can promote themselves on Twitter. The strange thing is that the image they used is the Twitter logo on what looks like a cigarette pack.

What were they thinking? Twitter smokes?

We have taken a screenshot so you can see what we’re talking about.