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The AlertFox Blog - Web Performance News

Saturday, January 7, 2012

AlertFox is growing in Europe

AlertFox is growing and we added a new monitoring station to the EU zone. The IP number of the new monitoring station is:

  •     46.137.111.47

You find the complete list at http://wiki.alertfox.com/IP_Address_Range#Monitoring_Stations

The IP address range information is useful if you want to filter AlertFox access from your web page log files (e. g. in Google Analytics) and/or if you want to give AlertFox access to an otherwise protected website.

Friday, November 11, 2011

DNS Management Service Zoneedit Down [Update]

The popular DNS management service Zoneedit is experiencing an extended downtime and users are complaining on Twitter. On the positive side, it seems "only" the web interface is affected, and not the DNS services itself. (Update: Site up again after 12 hours of downtime).



We will update this post when Zoneedit is available again. Zoneedit is a great service and we are using it ourself at AlertFox. But we sure wished they had a public dashboard. Every web service should have one.

Wednesday, November 2, 2011

Webpage Test - Monitor your website's global performance

Today we officially launch our new webpage test tool for website performance monitoring. It allows everyone to run a free website speed test from global multiple locations using real browsers (IE, Firefox and soon Chrome). All you need to do is enter the URL of the site you want to test. AlertFox starts a real browser in the USA, Europe and Asia and reports back the load time of each web page element as resource loading waterfall charts. And you can download the performance report in HAR format for detailed analysis.

If you are already an AlertFox user this test will look familiar to you: It is, of course, nothing other than the iMacros-powered real browser monitoring feature, now available as an online tool for quick and easy website performance tests in between. It is also useful to get global data for comparison with your local iMacros web testing results (e. g. from the iMacros web performance profiler).

Plus, you can share this test easily with your friends and coworkers: Just use the url displayed at the bottom of the page.

Example: Click http://alertfox.com/tools/har/?url=wiki.alertfox.com
to run a performance test for our AlertFox wiki. As result, you will see that the waterfall chart reveals the missing favicon image:




We do our best to keep this tool free for everyone, but testing websites with real browsers is resource intensive. If the use exceeds a certain limit, a captcha will be displayed. As an AlertFox PRO user you can circumvent this by logging into your website monitoring account and starting the test from there.

If you have any performance/optimization questions please ask us. We enjoy discussing Web Performance Optimization questions with you.

Wednesday, October 26, 2011

Performance Monitoring with Firefox 7

As you know, AlertFox uses real web browsers (as opposed to only simulated ones) for monitoring the real end-user experience and getting realistic website performance data.  


Today we upgraded our global website monitoring stations to Firefox 7 and iMacros V7.4. Internet Explorer remains, of course, at Version 9 (only security updates added). This upgrade is completely transparent. There is nothing to do for you as AlertFox users.

You can always view our current configuration at the backend wiki page.

.

Wednesday, October 5, 2011

Website Malware Monitoring with AlertFox

Website Malware Monitoring at AlertFox
Did you know AlertFox can also monitor your site for malware?   Malware distribution (viruses, Trojans, spyware etc.) has become a key issue for many website owners, as drive-by-download attacks are on the rise and malware distribution techniques are becoming increasingly effective.

There are expensive malware monitoring services like GlobalSign or HackAlert  - but the AlertFox real browser monitoring service provides you a similar security for free.

How do we do this? We use real web browsers for testing your site, and the malware monitoring comes as side effect, courtesy of Google.

This is how it works: 

Lets assume your site just got hacked...

1. Googlebot crawls your site every x minutes (x depends on how popular your site is)

2. As soon as Googlebot detects malware, that info is sent to the safe browsing list of Google, which is used by Chrome and Firefox.

3. On our test stations, the running browsers retrieve the latest malware update - and boing! - your transaction test will fail because the browsers block your site - and you get alerted by AlertFox!

To summarize, by using AlertFox Website Monitoring you get the power of Google's phishing and malware monitoring at no additional costs!

For more information on malware, see the Google Malware and Hacked Sites forum.

How to setup malware monitoring? If you already have a Firefox based transaction test running there is nothing else to do! Malware monitoring is active by default!

 

Monday, September 26, 2011

1and1 down - or why you need external website monitoring

Update 3: 1and1 up again. See our 1and1 network status page for details.

Update 2:  Down again! You can follow the up- and down on our public 1and1 network status page (based on the uptime monitoring wiki that we host at 1and1).
 
Update : 1and1 servers are up again (after more than 1.5h of downtime):

1and1 downtime as logged by AlertFox. The time zone is GMT (London).

Unfortunately our AlertFox wiki is currently a case study on why you need an external website monitoring service. One of our hosting providers, 1and1 (spelled "1und1" in German) is currently having a major network downtime. All 1and1 dedicated servers include an internal (1and1 hosted) monitoring service - which still showed all green while Twitter was already flooded with complaints. So the only thing this internal server monitoring service is good for is to show us that somewhere, deep inside the 1and1 datacenter our server is still up and running.


AlertFox detected the problem. You can follow our Wiki page status on our public status dashboard (Wiki page status at: http://status.alertfox.com/47514).

Note that this downtime "only" affects wiki and support center. Our core monitoring and user control center is not affected at all.

Friday, September 16, 2011

Public Services need Public Dashboards

Some days ago we started monitoring various online services (Email providers, job search sites, public transportation) with AlertFox transaction sensors. Do you think you know which of these is faster, or more reliable? Check the web performance benchmarks on their Public Dashboards at



Performance Benchmark Webmail: Time to login and open/read an email

- http://status-dashboard.com/35414  -Yahoo Mail vs. Gmail

Performance Benchmark German Job Portals:
Job search for "ASP.NET" programers and making sure results are displayed

- http://status-dashboard.com/35453  Federal Employment Office ("Arbeitsamt”) vs Monster.de

Performance Benchmark Railway:
Search for a specific train connection on a given date

- http://status-dashboard.com/35465  German / Swiss / French Railway Services

 

Important: AlertFox not only monitors site load time (everyone can easily optimize for this) but the true user experience. Alertfox does this by testing the end-user transaction performance, as measured in real web browers with simulated users (aka synthetic monitoring). 

If you want to publish your own website's performance with your users, e.g. for promoting your site’s reliability, just mark the results it as “public” on the sensor settings page. Of course, we have our own public status page at http://status.alertfox.com

[Solved] Web Transaction Monitoring Issues

This morning our main server instance had network connection issues and could not run web transaction measurements for about four hours. You will see "white space" (indicating: no data available) in the tactical overview report. Note that classical measurements and alerting were not affected by this problem.

Thursday, September 15, 2011

Alerts get new e-mails and new subjects

Reliable alerts is one of the key features of AlertFox. In addition to that, we are always interested in improving the way you receive our alerts making them informative right from the start. Here are two enhancements that will take place in the next days:

1. Improved, clearer email subject line

DOWN - HTTP: Sensor description (http://www.mywebsite.com)
UP - HTTP: Sensor description (http://www.mywebsite.com)

DOWN - iMacros: Sensor description [Error -321, error message]
UP - iMacros: Sensor description

The screenshot shows old alert emails vs new alert emails format.

2. New alerts will be sent from down@alerts.alertfox.com (down alerts) and up@alerts.alertfox.com. (up alerts).


The main purpose for this change is to allow mobile devices users to immediately see what the alert is about even before they open the e-mail/SMS. That is especially useful when roaming in another country and you might only be able to see the email address but not the content without incurring roaming charges (that happened to us this summer). And even in normal situations, it allows you to see immediately if AlertFox brings good or bad news.


We understand that some of our users have set up system to automatically filter and process our alert notifications. Thus we will leave the old system in place for all current users by default.

In order to migrate to the new settings (for both improved e-mails and improved subjects), you need to open your AlertFox Control Panel, navigate to 'Settings' - 'Account Settings', press 'Edit' and check the 'Use new settings for alerts' check box.


All new users will have the new settings enabled by default.

Wednesday, September 14, 2011

Debugging Web Transaction Tests by analyzing HTTP traffic

Recently a customer reported a failed transaction test (iMacros macro) to us. He said that the screenshot looked fine to him. He could even see the image the macro couldn’t find, on the screenshot.

I have tested the sensor and looked at the .har file the test produced and it took me only a couple of seconds to understand what the problem was: The user’s macro was specifying a full path to the image like this:

TAG POS=1 TYPE=IMG ATTR=SRC:http://my.url.com/images/buttons/btn.png

However, the HAR file showed that btn.png was coming from a different domain: static.url.com.
It would sometimes come from my.url.com and sometimes from static.url.com.

The solution was to change the macro line from
TAG POS=1 TYPE=IMG ATTR=SRC:http://my.url.com/images/buttons/btn.png
to
TAG POS=1 TYPE=IMG ATTR=SRC:*.url.com/images/buttons/btn.png


This is one of dozens of other things a visualized .har file can tell you. It even includes snapshots of HTML for every page you’ve accessed within your iMacros sensor. HTTP Archive files (.har) are very useful when debugging complex problems with your web pages.
Read more about .har files here.

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