When his phone wakes him at two in the morning, operations engineer Andy Pearson knows it’s bad news. There’s a major server problem, and hundreds of client websites are down. Automated monitoring checks detected the outage within seconds, and paged the on-call engineer. This time, it’s Pearson in the hot seat. Pearson quickly confirms the issue is real and, escalates it to his boss, tech lead Lewis Carey.
December was a busy month with systems we don’t normally see experiencing server downtime. Our first story, in particular, is an excellent example of how complicated monitoring can get as infrastructure grows. We saw every level get hit, from the government to big-name players, with ransomware being one of the major thorns in our collective sides. But we also bring you the heartwarming tale of the little Minecraft Server that could.
One thing we’ve always known: there’s no such thing as 100% uptime for any website. Too many variables are at play to keep a site from staying up all the time. From traffic surges to hardware failures and everything in between, keeping sites up and running is a full-time job for SREs and IT pros. Here at Uptime.com, we track major downtime all year long to provide websites of all sizes with lessons in how to catch downtime and resolve incidents quickly.
Tis’ the season for website downtime. No matter how great your web infrastructure is, many ecommerce sites experience downtime on Black Friday. You’re not alone. New research by Google Cloud says that one out of ten retail executives reported downtime on Black Friday 2018, and four out of ten reported outages during one of the past three years.
Real User Monitoring, or RUM, is about measuring the user experience. Not what the user is doing, but what is happening to the user. How is your server performing when the user is making a request? This hidden metric is part of the user’s overall motivation. After all, we all know the frustration of a slow moving website.
This past month was haunted with social media outages, finance, and tech services. DDoS attacks affected entire countries and broadband services in Africa. We’re continuing to see a pattern of outages from social media services with multiple applications. When one of these apps goes down, at least one of the others usually goes as well. The worst of these outages occurred in March, when Facebook’s entire suite of apps went down.
A signup form has a ton of moving parts we often take for granted. There’s the form itself, and the database attached to that form that stores user data. Other databases may need to sync with the form, such as marketing drip emails or coupons. There’s often a thank you page with analytics attached to track goals, that may be gated behind an account. Any of these parts could break and our form might appear to function fine at first glance.
Last year’s ecommerce holiday shopping sales were at an all-time high. According to Adobe, Cyber Monday topped Black Friday with $7.87 billion in sales. While many companies have holiday advertising and marketing strategies in place, is your website optimized to give buyers the best possible shopping experience? We’ve created this handy guide to help you get ready for the mass of online shoppers looking for a deal. The last thing you want is to have a website meltdown on the big day.
Dashboards do their job best when they are a centralized space for the data you need. Not all data, but specifically those key performance indicators that drive the decision making at the top. Uptime.com created a customizable dashboard system that brings that level of personalization to you and your organization.
October is National Cybersecurity Awareness Month (NCSAM) in the US. IT departments are tasked with protecting more than ever. Today’s IT department is responsible for creating, maintaining and managing a myriad of systems. Not only do you need to secure internal connections, but you also need to ensure availability for cloud-based applications and your company website. Many of the suggestions below may be already in place.
