Operations | Monitoring | ITSM | DevOps | Cloud

A new version of RapidSpike is due to be released in the next few days. Here’s what’s changed, and what’s new.

2018 has been an amazing year for RapidSpike, we have been super busy helping people deliver awesome website performance and we’ve built some amazing new features. Here’s this year’s rundown on our brilliant digital experience monitoring platform.

Just as we were getting ready to launch our Data Breach Monitor, we heard the unfortunate news that fellow Yorkshire based business Vision Direct had suffered a malware attack, which resulted in the loss of financial data of around 6,600 customers. So we asked ourselves, could we have detected the same attack using our new monitor? The only way to find out was to infect a website and see what would happen…

Lighthouse is an open-source quality testing tool built by Google. Normally run on command line or through browser DevTools, Lighthouse analyses a given url and performs a series of audits. Lighthouse tests on a number of broad categories, including: Performance, Progressive Web App (PWA), Accessibility, Best Practices, Search Engine Optimisation. Schedule a daily audit of your website or app with Google Lighthouse, the latest addition to our fantastic Intelligent Page Monitor tool.

RapidSpike would like to make a statement about how one of our developers assisted the City of York Council with a potential data breach on their One Planet York mobile app in early November.

The retail world is under attack. Hackers across the globe are stealing personal details – including credit card information – on an alarmingly regular basis. This is done by placing digital “credit card skimmers” on compromised e-commerce sites. Hackers are able to access these sites usually through 3rd parties software in the form of JavaScript. Major retailers are prime targets – they are not immune and it’s a becoming a BIG problem for everyone.

The world is in a digital revolution, change is happening and with it, new industries are being born. Enterprises in all sectors are creating new and diverse revenue streams and disrupting old and established business models. In fact, I am convinced we are all working and living during one of the largest business revolutions in history.

Eating your own dog food is a concept also referred to as dogfooding. This is when a company uses its own product which was made famous by Google and Microsoft who employ the tactic to test their products in real-world usage. Dogfooding can act as quality control, and can also be a kind of testimonial advertising. For leaders, it’s a way to truly understand what you have, help you set your future direction and understand the challenges your team face on a day to day basis.

Our Intelligent Page Monitor (IPM) is a great tool for several different reasons. It will detect element errors (e.g. 404s). It’s fantastic for AB testing. It captures a regular screenshot of your page. It runs from locations all around the world. And it’s a powerful performance monitor, giving you statistics for every element loaded on a page.

It’s essential to monitor server vitals such as CPU utilisation, memory usage and free disk space to spot the warning signs of impending doom (hands up those that have run out of disk space on a production server before. Many turn to Application Performance Monitoring (APM) software for help. But APM solutions can be expensive, require software to be installed and require system access that some people may not be comfortable with.