Those of you familiar with us know that we here at Pingdom provide an uptime monitoring service that allows its users the ability to monitor the uptime (availability) of their websites and servers from the Internet. This way, if there is a problem, they will be alerted right away.

Normally our users access their data via an online control panel, but we also have an API that the more technically inclined can use to access their data.

Showing system status with the Pingdom API

One of the companies that use Pingdom is Camvine, a company with a product called CODA that allows you to display information on remote displays, all managed via a central website.

They have done something we think is really cool, using Pingdom’s API to access their monitoring data, adding a real-time status display for their system:

Here is their description, explaining the rationale behind the status display:

Whether you’re a large or small organisation, there’s probably some computers somewhere that you rely on being available all the time, and need to know quickly when they’re not. Systems exist out there to tell specific people when machines are upset, but it helps to have this information generally available to people in your organisation, not just when they’re at a computer. To solve this, you can use CODA to keep everyone in the company up-to-date with the health your server infrastructure at a glance.

Here at Camvine we need to know the status of our web server that our customers use, but there’s also a suite of servers (mail server, our test servers, etc.) that are vital to the smooth running of Camvine. To make sure we keep on top of all this we make use the Pingdom monitoring system. Pingdom will not only email a set of people when servers fail, but it has an API that lets you query the information programmatically – and we use this to ensure our tech team, via CODA, can always see what’s going on.

Very nifty indeed! We have seen some creative ways how companies have made use of our API to combine Pingdom monitoring with their own internal services, but this is one of the nicest yet (and certainly very useful and visually pleasing).

You can find more information and source code on their website.

Pingdom’s Podcast is a weekly show about Internet, web, security, and mobile stuff.

In this show, Saleh also gives us an update on the pending approval of his Carbon for Windows Phone Twitter client. We also talked about Nokia’s recent financial results, if Google Chrome can hit more than 50% market share this year, and the recent privacy-blunder by the guys behind the Path mobile app.

Read more

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.

Read more

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.

Read more

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.

Read more

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.

Read more