Västerås, Sweden — April 10, 2013 — Pingdom, a leading global provider of website uptime and performance monitoring, announced today the release of its Real User Monitoring service. With the new service, website owners will know exactly how real visitors experience their website. The performance data that is collected from all visitors to a website is visualized into easy-to-understand graphs and summaries. This makes the data easy to analyze, and the website owner can see how it relates to browsers, platforms and even countries — all in real-time.

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Surrey Business IT, based in the UK, came across our radar last year when it developed a Windows desktop notifier application for Pingdom’s website monitoring service.

It took us a while, but now we’ve connected with Richard Benson, Senior Web Developer/Technician, to talk about the notifier and all the other exciting things these guys are using Pingdom’s services for.

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Shortly after 9am CET today, Friday December 7, 2012, some of our systems started to experience downtime. This included our pingdom.com homepage and the customer control panel at my.pingdom.com. All systems have now been restored and are operating at normal capacity and functionality.

Monitoring of our customer’s websites was not affected, but alerts, unfortunately, were delayed. We are as passionate about uptime as our customers are, and this sort of thing should not happen. Since this is a rare occurrence for us, we want to take this opportunity to explain what happened, at least insofar as we know right now.

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The US presidential election is certainly heating up. With Election Day on November 6 approaching fast and the television debates on schedule, we thought we would take a look at how the candidates are doing in terms of their web presence. Put in another way, who is winning the race so far, when it comes to website performance and uptime?

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Today, the Pingdom team deployed a software upgrade to some of our monitoring probes. Despite thorough testing, this upgrade contained a malfunction that led to false down alerts being sent to a portion of our customers.

Even if the issue affected monitoring for less than 90 minutes for a limited number of customers, it’s of course frustrating if you were one of them. We take a lot of pride in delivering a reliable service and this doesn’t represent what Pingdom stands for.

Let us first stress how rare it is that something like this happens at Pingdom. In fact, this is the first time a similar occurrence has struck us. That said, we want to take this opportunity to provide information about what happened, present what actions we’ve already taken, as well as tell you how we move forward.

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We have in several articles recently written about how the top brands in the world are using social media, like Facebook and Twitter. That peaked our interest in these global giants so we decided to start following their web presence as well to see if there’s possibly more to find.

With Coca-Cola in the lead, followed by IBM, Microsoft, and Google, this is a list of some of the biggest companies in the world, and we think you will find it particularly interesting to follow how they perform online.

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Pingdom has studied the uptime of the official websites of all 290 municipalities in Sweden during July, and we can now present that only 17% of the sites scored a perfect 100% uptime. In this study, we also identify the 20 municipalities with the worst uptime record in July.

It’s clear on the basis of this study that website uptime is something that many municipalities in Sweden continue to struggle with. Availability of their websites and other online services is a key issue that needs to be dealt with, as more and more local governments around the world, including municipalities, take to the Internet for communicating with residents and conducting business.

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We just wanted to let you know that we recently updated our iPhone and Android apps.

So what’s new in this version? Mainly two things:

• The ability to pause/unpause monitoring. We added a toggle control for this on the check info page. This can be handy if you need to do some maintenance and don’t want to trigger a lot of alerts, for example. Just don’t forget to start the monitoring back up when you’re done!
• An outage view, where you can also examine the reason behind each outage. This is the new default view when you tap on a check. Needless to say, this is great for troubleshooting on the go. Tapping on an outage will show you which monitoring locations first detected the outage, and the reason for the error (for example a connection timeout or an HTTP error code).

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The cloud storage war is heating up. Dropbox is getting more and more competition, and now Google has joined the fray with Google Drive. We’re not going to compare features in this article, but rather test something we can actually measure. And since we here at Pingdom do site monitoring we have focused on how these services compare in terms of performance and reliability.

To make this survey even more interesting, we also added two other file hosting services: Microsoft’s SkyDrive and Box.com. They should give us some additional perspective.

To monitor reliability and performance, in this specific case we thought their homepages were less important than the actual file hosting they offer, so that is what we focused on. We uploaded the same identical file to the four services, a small PNG image, and made it publicly available so we could monitor it.

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Most of you probably noticed that Gmail experienced some downtime yesterday. If you missed it, you had probably retired to your Batcave.

Google was presenting up to 10% of Gmail users with a 500 error, leaving scores of people hanging, in some cases unable to work on necessary tasks.

There were some really funny tweets about the outage. And of course we at Pingdom love humor and this has to be one of the most hilarious ones.

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