How Often are You Asked “Is the Website Down?” Such calls can lead to hours of lost time only to find out it was a minor issue for a limited user base. Do you have the tools in place to proactively detect and deal with such issues?
The new DNS caching features at Dotcom-Monitor allow you to perform some interesting tests that show how DNS caching can affect your page load speed.
We realize that many organizations monitor their online services with a number different goals in mind, and so we listened to the feedback we received that some users want to include the DNS response time in their monitoring and some users want to be able to remove DNS response from their monitors.
How you wish to handle DNS response time in regard to your monitoring needs is up to you, but we want to take this opportunity to show the differences in how DNS response time affects website load using our new tools.
We ran a test monitoring YouTube from a single location in the midwest United States with three different DNS cache settings. A basic HTTP full page load on the YouTube front page resulted in some interesting, although not that surprising results.
Keep in mind the results will vary depending upon a number of variables such as which locations you are monitoring from, the time of day, the load on the DNS servers, and on the website servers.
For George, the clean-up is just beginning. He is not even yet aware that his domain is blacklisted. All he knows is that he can’t send out additional emails, the update email on the company party that evening is now a fire-drill, and his boss is giving the system administrator and him the stink eye. The problem of not knowing for hours that your site has appeared on a DNS Blacklist (DNSBL) and that email—and, even worse, potentially website visitors—are being rejected is a problem with both primary impacts and multiple secondary impacts.
Microsoft Exchange continues to grow in popularity, but until recently active monitoring via full round-trip processes have been lacking in the marketplace. As a result network administrators have found it difficult to accurately pinpoint Microsoft Exchange issues effectively. Dotcom-Monitor’s Microsoft Exchange Monitoring, actively monitors both the availability and performance of Exchange components and provides alerts and diagnostics information when an issue is detected. Among a wealth of other features, the solution includes the industry’s only tool for monitoring ActiveSync externally, so it mimics the same experience a real user would receive.
The VoIP marketplace is growing. If your organization uses a SIP-based VoIP solution its likely you’ve experienced issues in the form of dropped calls, or the inability to receive calls. Dotcom-Monitor’s SIP monitoring service tests a SIP-based VoIP system by actually making SIP test calls and measuring the results, allowing you to get back to work and know that your VoIP system is continually online.
How can you tell if the CDN you’re utilizing is actually paying dividends in terms of speeding up delivery of content to your website users? CDN monitoring can help the IT department—which has lost significant control over the servers that store the content because of CDN use—track key metrics to determine CDN performance and see if the CDN is living up to its SLA.
April 30, 2014 – Neustar UltraDNS Down – Dotcom-Monitor is tracking a Neustar UltraDNS outage at this time. The UltraDNS outage appears to have started at approximately 10:34 am CST and extended to 12:47 noon while stabilizing. (UPDATE- As of 4:07 pm CST UltraDNS continues to experience DNS resolution instability.) The UltraDNS issue
Regardless of how your company uses streaming media, media stream monitoring is a requirement to protect the performance, integrity and availability of video streaming services. Because online media streams come in multiple online stream formats and codecs across browser platforms, a robust media stream monitoring solution that monitors content from the perspective of the end user is required.
Dotcom-Monitor HTTPS monitoring also includes Secure Socket Layer (SSL) Certificate monitoring, which checks SSL certificates for problems and expiration.
Dec. 19, 2013 – Dotcom-Monitor, a web performance monitoring company, detected a short spike in connection times to the Target.com website that occurred on Dec. 18, 2013 at approximately 12:30 pm CST. The spike in connection time at the Target.com website corresponded to widespread announcements in the media that Target had suffered a massive data breach. According to news sources, such as the Huffington Post, Los Angeles Times and others, Target credit card systems were hacked and user information was exposed in its entirety, including security codes (CVV numbers), credit card numbers, names, addresses – to unknown perpetrators.
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