Synthetic Monitoring

Simulate visitor interaction with your site to monitor the end user experience.

View Product Info

FEATURES

Simulate visitor interaction

Identify bottlenecks and speed up your website.

Learn More

Real User Monitoring

Enhance your site performance with data from actual site visitors

View Product Info

FEATURES

Real user insights in real time

Know how your site or web app is performing with real user insights

Learn More

Infrastructure Monitoring Powered by SolarWinds AppOptics

Instant visibility into servers, virtual hosts, and containerized environments

View Infrastructure Monitoring Info
Comprehensive set of turnkey infrastructure integrations

Including dozens of AWS and Azure services, container orchestrations like Docker and Kubernetes, and more 

Learn More

Application Performance Monitoring Powered by SolarWinds AppOptics

Comprehensive, full-stack visibility, and troubleshooting

View Application Performance Monitoring Info
Complete visibility into application issues

Pinpoint the root cause down to a poor-performing line of code

Learn More

Log Management and Analytics Powered by SolarWinds Loggly

Integrated, cost-effective, hosted, and scalable full-stack, multi-source log management

 View Log Management and Analytics Info
Collect, search, and analyze log data

Quickly jump into the relevant logs to accelerate troubleshooting

Learn More

Post-mortem for recent incidents

Some of you may have noticed that over the past 4 days, we have experienced some issues and downtime to areas of our service, which, we know is frustrating. In the spirit of transparency, we’d like to share the good, the bad and the ugly of what went down (pun intended), how we fixed it and how we’ve tried to future-proof it going forward. 

We’d like to apologize for the outages and subsequent disruption to our service and whilst some issues took a while to fix, we’d like to assure you that a) we worked as fast as possible to resolve the issue and b) to ensure that similar incidents are avoided in the future.

The Outages

Note: All times referenced below are Coordinated Universal Time (UTC).

My Pingdom portal outage

  • Our dashboard My Pingdom was unavailable from Thursday July 7th 2016 15:23 – 15:55, for 32 minutes.
  • Alerting and monitoring of our customer’s checks was not affected but access was limited due to a failure with one of our load balancers.
  • Pingdom Ops fixed the issue with load balancer and full service was restored.

 

We reinstalled the load balancers with new software which should prevent this type of incident from occurring in the future. Additional monitoring has been set up to catch any degradation before it affects customers.

Performance degradation of My Pingdom

  • Occurred on Friday July 8th 2016 07:18 – 16:28
  • Our database overloaded as a table grew 10 times bigger. As a result, customers experienced a general slowdown in My Pingdom.
  • Pingdom Ops resolved the issue at 16:28 when the database was cleaned up properly.

 

This was our biggest outage, and although My Pingdom was available, the speed at which it was loading for our customers was unacceptable for us. The issue stemmed from a malformed SQL query that duplicated all rows in a table a couple of times. In our resolution to this issue, we tried several solutions (that failed), including migrating the database to different servers. In the end we decided to simply purge the affected rows from the database. Due to the size of our database, pinpointing the source of the problem was quite time consuming and added to the duration of the downtime.

Checklists and reports unavailable

  • Occurred on Monday July 11th 12:11 – 13:05
  • A configuration error caused reports and checks not to load in My Pingdom and all customers were affected. This did not affect monitoring or alerting in any way either, but loading data in my Pingdom was impossible.

 

We’ll put our hands up and say that most of the errors that led to these incidents were man-made: we done goofed. With that, when you have humans in the mix, there is always a risk that something will fall over and create an incident. However, we have learned from this (as we do from every incident) and we’re learning to be extra thorough in our checks – more aggressive testing could have caught the database overload sooner but due to the nature of the bug it might still have been difficult to detect during testing – the database grew slowly in the beginning, so the problem was not imminent.

Webpages Are Getting Larger Every Year, and Here’s Why it Matters

Last updated: February 29, 2024 Average size of a webpage matters because it [...]

A Beginner’s Guide to Using CDNs

Last updated: February 28, 2024 Websites have become larger and more complex [...]

The Five Most Common HTTP Errors According to Google

Last updated: February 28, 2024 Sometimes when you try to visit a web page, [...]

Page Load Time vs. Response Time – What Is the Difference?

Last updated: February 28, 2024 Page load time and response time are key met [...]

Can gzip Compression Really Improve Web Performance?

Last updated: February 26, 2024 The size of the web is slowly growing. Over [...]

Monitor your website’s uptime and performance

With Pingdom's website monitoring you are always the first to know when your site is in trouble, and as a result you are making the Internet faster and more reliable. Nice, huh?

START YOUR FREE 30-DAY TRIAL

MONITOR YOUR WEB APPLICATION PERFORMANCE

Gain availability and performance insights with Pingdom – a comprehensive web application performance and digital experience monitoring tool.

START YOUR FREE 30-DAY TRIAL
Start monitoring for free