New! Pingdom status plugin for WordPress
Do you run a web service or hosting company? Do you like transparency? Then this might be of interest to you.
Service status blogs are becoming increasingly common these days and are usually very appreciated by users. Look no further than Twitter’s famous status blog, or the Google Apps status page. Status blogs (or “status pages”, depending on approach) may look and work differently, but they all serve the same purpose, informing users about service issues.
Now it’s easier than ever before if you want one, or want to make your existing status blog even better.
Making it easy to create a powerful status blog
To make it really easy for companies to offer a comprehensive status blog, we are now releasing a free Pingdom status plugin for WordPress. Using this plugin you can combine Pingdom’s monitoring with the world’s most widespread blogging platform.
What the Pingdom status plugin adds to your blog:
- A public status page. It creates a page on your WordPress blog which shows the current status (up or down) of the sites and servers you monitor with Pingdom.
- Monitoring history. Users can drill down and view detailed uptime and response time history for each monitored item.
- Make all or just some results public. You can select to make all your monitoring results public, or just some of them. Often companies have additional monitoring set up that may not be directly relevant to their users.
- Grouping. You can create groups of monitored items and name them, for example “web servers,” “database servers,” “websites,” etc. This makes it easy for you to categorize the results for your users.
- Default or custom design. The plugin comes with an attractive default styling, but you can modify it as much as you like, for example by adding your own colors and branding, etc.
All you need is a Pingdom account and a WordPress blog. Once you have that, setting up the plugin won’t take more than five minutes.
To get started, just follow the plugin installation instructions. All settings are done inside the standard WordPress admin control panel, in the Plugins section.
Screenshots
Here is an example of what the main status page looks like:
In the above case we have created a group named “Websites.” You can of course have multiple groups.
By clicking on any of the monitored items, users can drill in and examine its status history:
Final notes
This plugin was designed for self-hosted WordPress blogs (i.e. using the WordPress.org software). It won’t work for blogs hosted on the WordPress.com service.
Also, a small but important thing to keep in mind: Host your status blog separately. If your main site or service goes down, you still want your status blog to be accessible.
And in case you missed the link to the plugin, here it is again: http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/pingdom-status/
We hope you will find it useful.
About Pingdom:
In case you arrived here not familiar with Pingdom, we offer a service that monitors websites and servers for our users, sending alerts if errors are detected, and providing a control panel where our users can examine their monitoring history and troubleshoot problems. We have tens of thousands of users, ranging all the way from large corporations to hobbyist webmasters. You can read more about our features at www.pingdom.com.
Pingdom has paid monitoring packages starting at $9.95 per month, but also a free package for monitoring one site.
Pingdom’s Podcast is a weekly show about Internet, web, security, and mobile stuff. 
There’s no denying that 
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!
Fredrik Poller
August 25th, 2010 at 8:31 am
To bad it doesn’t work, I’m getting the following error when trying to activate the plugin:
Plugin could not be activated because it triggered a fatal error.
Parse error: syntax error, unexpected $end in /usr/local/www/poller.se/wp-content/plugins/pingdom-status/PingdomStatus.php on line 1136
I installed the plugin automatically with the plugin browser.
Pontus Abrahamsson
August 25th, 2010 at 8:40 am
This is awesome ! I love your service!
Brian
August 25th, 2010 at 9:16 am
May want to mention on the plugin website that SOAP should be compiled into your PHP install to work correctly. My host didn’t provide that in its install so I have a few more hoops to jump through.
Pingdom
August 25th, 2010 at 9:25 am
@Fredrik Poller: We’re working on fixing that. An update should be up very soon.
Roger Theriault
August 25th, 2010 at 11:24 am
The plugin doesn’t activate, with fatal errors about missing include files.
Your lines
`require_once(ABSPATH . ‘wp-content/plugins/PingdomStatus/…`
assume the content dir is always in the same place, and the plugin directory is always PingdomStatus (which it isn’t when you use the auto-install).
Try `plugin_basename( dirname( __FILE__ ) .’/file_to_include’`
Wallace
August 25th, 2010 at 11:34 am
Look pretty good with the admin dashboard,
i have no longer to go to pingdom homepage.
Pingdom
August 25th, 2010 at 12:32 pm
@Roger Theriault: Thanks, we’re aware of it. We’re testing a fix now, uploaded shortly.
Pingdom
August 25th, 2010 at 1:00 pm
Ok, everyone. Thank you for the quick feedback. The problem with auto-install should now have been fixed (we’ve tested it, and it works fine). Apologies for the inconvenience.
We’ve uploaded a version 1.1.1 to WordPress now that properly supports the auto-install feature in addition to manual install.
If you run into any problems, remove the old install before you install the new one.
Dan Knights
August 25th, 2010 at 2:46 pm
I seem to be getting a 404 when clicking on a monitor name. Any ideas why this would be?
Thanks
Dan Knights
August 25th, 2010 at 2:54 pm
Found the problem. Seems it doesn’t like you creating another page and setting that as the homepage.
Dan Knights
August 26th, 2010 at 6:22 am
When should it start generating graphs? Mine have been blank for about 12 hours.
Pingdom
August 26th, 2010 at 7:21 am
@Dan Knights: It’s supposed to work right away, right after you’ve synched the first time. If you have a brand new Pingdom account, though, the graphs won’t have much to work with since you have almost no monitoring history (i.e. the graphs show one month, and if your account is hours old, there’s not much to show on that scale).
Dan Knights
August 27th, 2010 at 5:35 am
Thanks, it is a new account but I would have expected to see some points on the graph within a couple of days? It’s still blank at the moment.
Pingdom
August 27th, 2010 at 6:47 am
@Dan Knights: Please send an email to support -at- pingdom.com and we’ll have a look at it and see if we can help. Don’t forget to include a URL to your status blog.
Donnie
August 27th, 2010 at 8:09 am
I follow through to a check to see the reports. It goes to this link.
http://www.domain.com/page-name/?sensorId=1
Loads just fine and it works. However on that page the top link on the left that says “« Go back to all services” does not work. It links back to this link.
http://www.domain.com/?page_id=0
Rather than going back to the original page (http://www.domain.com/page-name/)
Other than this little bug it appears to work great.
Donnie
August 27th, 2010 at 8:26 am
It would be cool to have a widget that can be placed on the page. I see a folder called widget, but it’s empty.
Pingdom
August 27th, 2010 at 8:39 am
@Donnie: Thanks for the heads up. We’ll have a look and see if we can find out why this is happening for you. We’ll be in touch via email.
Kumar
August 30th, 2010 at 3:39 am
I am getting a 404 when clicking on a monitor name. Whats da solution. Please reply.
Pingdom
August 30th, 2010 at 6:22 am
@Kumar: Sounds strange. Please send an email to support -at- pingdom.com explaining your problem a little more in detail (including a URL if possible) and we’ll see what we can do to help.
Komarik
September 3rd, 2010 at 9:32 am
Hello!
First, thanks for the plugin, and of course for the Pingdom service itself.
The plugin works fine, except for one detail. The graphs show the wrong date. The plugin is trying to send us in the past, pointing to both charts 1969 and 1970.
Look at the page komarik.ru/pingdom
Any ideas?
Thanx.
Pingdom
September 3rd, 2010 at 10:03 am
@Komarik: Thanks for the heads up. We’ll have a look!
Tobias
September 29th, 2010 at 4:41 am
I receive an error when I click at “Public checks” in the WordPress Plugin Settings.
Fatal error: Allowed memory size of 33554432 bytes exhausted (tried to allocate 75 bytes) in /var/www/vhosts/domain/subdomains/subdomainname/httpdocs/wp-content/plugins/pingdom-status/php/doctrine/Doctrine/Record.php on line 714
Pingdom
September 30th, 2010 at 3:30 am
@Tobias: Very strange. Would you mind emailing support -at- pingdom.com with some more information? For example if you’re experiencing this on any of the other settings pages? Plus, what Pingdom account you’re using. Please do that, and we’ll see if we can find out what’s happening.
Donnie
November 11th, 2010 at 11:11 pm
My website has been hanging when it loads. So I ran the index file through strace and found it to hang when calling this file: /home/newlifel/public_html/wp-content/plugins/pingdom-status/php/data_layer/generated/BasePingdomPsResponseTime.php
Why does it cause the site to hang for roughly 5 seconds? What is this script doing? I thought the plugin only displayed the data already on Pingdom servers to display the graphs and charts.
Any assistance would be helpful. I can’t justify the site hanging for 5 seconds while the page loads.
See for yourself: http://www.newlifelinks.com
Pingdom
November 12th, 2010 at 4:26 am
@Donnie: We’d need to look closer at that. Please send this and as much other information as you can about your blog’s setup to support -at- pingdom dot com and we’ll handle it from there. (This blog isn’t exactly ideal for support issues.
)