All the posts from Blog have been copied into Royal, and links to these posts should redirect to their new homes on Royal.

This also means that the RSS feed for this blog will cease to exist. To keep up with what we do you should therefore subscribe to the Royal feed instead, if you don’t already.

Royal’s RSS feed is http://feeds.feedburner.com/RoyalPingdom.

The post Merging with the Royal blog appeared first on Pingdom Blog.

That’s not even mentioning the new office we moved into earlier this year and all the great new geeky additions to the team. But we’re really only getting started, and we wanted to give a look at the future.

We’re making these investments, of course, because we want to deliver the best possible service in uptime and performance monitoring. You keep giving us feedback on what kind of functionality you’d like to see us including in future releases, and we’d like to think we listen to what you tell us.

We have several new and exciting products and additions under development and to support them we’ve invested in some new hardware. Exactly what we’ll be doing with all this new gear is something we’ll have to keep under wraps for now. But we promise that we will let you know just as soon as possible.

The bulk of the new gear was installed last week and we wanted to give you a sneak peek behind the scenes.

The post Sneak peek at some new Pingdom hardware appeared first on Pingdom Blog.

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.

Our normal deployment of new and updated software consists of a series of tests designed to making sure that our systems are reliable. This means that we roll out updates gradually to our infrastructure and only after they’ve been thoroughly tested in our development and staging environment.

Today at around 8 am GMT we gradually started to roll out the update to a few selected monitoring probes. Immediately we saw that there was an issue with the code and did a rollback. But, unfortunately, a limited number of customers had faulty downtimes recorded in their data and in some cases also received faulty down alerts during a limited time.

After a thorough investigation we’ve already initiated actions to minimize the effect this may have had, including:

• Affected Pingdom checks will have their up and down records marked as unmonitored for the period in question, up to a maximum of 90 minutes. Therefore, each site’s uptime record will not be affected. In other words, your uptime percentage will not change due to this incident.
• Any lost SMS credits due to incorrect alerts in connection with this issue have been refunded. You will receive double the amount of credits that was used during the incident.
• We will take further steps to make sure that future upgrades to our infrastructure will be implemented with even more caution. This incident has already led to improvements in our deployment routines.

We want you to rest assured that all of us working at Pingdom take significant pride in delivering the best possible service, and even though mistakes happen they are not acceptable to us.

If you were affected by this, we’re really sorry. You can be sure that someone will be wearing the stupid hat today.

Please contact us at support@pingdom.com if you have any questions or comments.

The post Bug temporarily affected monitoring for a portion of our customers today appeared first on Pingdom Blog.

Continuing a string of recent hires, we’re today very happy to welcome interaction designer Magnus Leo to the Pingdom team. We’re excited to find out what he really means when he says “I make things interactive.”

Magnus comes from Strömsholm, not far from the Pingdom HQ in Västerås, Sweden. Playing the DOS game The Incredible Machine on a Windows 3.1 PC was one of his first experiences with a computer.

That progressed to “lite programming” with The Games Factory. Later, he was introduced to more serious programming in high school, which was when he first realized he was born to hack.

After some programming courses in high school, Magnus studied interaction design at Mälardalen University. His interest in interactivity and how to design interactive systems took off and he immersed himself in cognitive science, computer science, programming, and much more. The Internet in general and the web in particular later became the natural outlet for his creativity and interested in interaction design.

Above all, he wants to create interactive systems for humans, systems that behave like they should, in a predictable manner, so that they are easy to use.

Magnus summed up his view of his new role at Pingdom: “I develop that which is visible to the user and make it work. I make things interactive.”

With such an approach, we’re sure that Magnus will be a great addition to the Pingdom team.

Would Pingdom be a good fit for you?

Do you think that Pingdom would be a good fit for you? Even though Magnus has joined Pingdom, there’s still room for you in our super geeky, talented, and fun team.

If you want to join our team, you could be a key component in accomplishing our mission of making uptime and performance monitoring even easier and more available to the entire world. Besides, you will have a choice of what crazy maxed out and packed computer you want to run – Linux, Mac, or Windows.

If you would like to find out more about the positions available, head over to our career site for all the details. It’s in Swedish, as you might imagine.

PS. We’ve made it even easier to apply. Now you can apply for a position using your LinkedIn account.

The post Pingdom welcomes interaction designer Magnus Leo appeared first on Pingdom Blog.

We have in several articles recently on the Royal Pingdom blog 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.

Based on Interbrand’s ranking of the top 100 most valuable brands in the world, we have set up a monitoring list to keep an eye on them. You simply go to http://png.dm/worldstop100brands.

There you can see the list of sites, click on each one to get further details, and even select which range of dates you’d like to look at in more depth.

Like with all our public reports pages, it’s continuously updated. If you take a look at the status page, you may notice that the uptime (right now, at least) looks good for these brands, with only a few instances of downtime.

Do you have suggestions for other lists we could put together and publish? Let us know in the comments below.

Image (top) via Shutterstock.

Update (2012-10-05): Since Interbrand has released its 2012 report we’ve updated our monitoring list accordingly. Six brands made it onto the list (Facebook, Kia, MasterCard, Pampers, Prada, and Ralph Lauren) and six dropped off the list (Armani, Barclays, HTC, Nivea, UBS, and Zurich).

The post We now monitor the world’s top 100 brands (updated) appeared first on Pingdom Blog.

Pingdom now welcomes another Born to Hack ninja to the team. Markus Liljedahl will be working with frontend development and quality assurance. His background in both networking and programming will serve him perfectly in his new job.

Just as many others working in Pingdom, Markus was born and raised in Västerås, Sweden, where our HQ is located. When he was about eight years old, his father bought him a Commodore 64 computer, and that’s where his interest in computers stem from.

Since there were only a small number of programs and games available for the C64, Markus decided to learn programming. He bought some books, and the rest is, as they say, history.

A keen interest in problem solving and figuring out how things work kept Markus’ skills growing and, later, he studied both networking and programming at Mälardalen University in Västerås.

Markus has already got familiar with his new role in Pingdom, working with both frontend development and quality assurance. As it happens, Markus actually had a connection with Pingdom even before he started working here. He’s the developer of the Pingdom Notifier for Mac, a free must-install utility if you are a Pingdom user with a Mac.

We still have open positions available

Even as Markus is settling in at Pingdom and getting started with his new job, we’re still looking for more super geeky, exciting, and fun people to join us. Perhaps you’re one of them?

We’re not exaggerating when we say that Pingdom is the place where you will be challenged to perform at the highest level, as well as given the opportunity to work on products that affect real people all over the world.

In other words, if you’re looking for new challenges, consider if Pingdom might be the place for you! We probably don’t even have to mention that you will have a choice of what crazy maxed out and packed computer you want to run – Linux, Mac, or Windows.

If you would like to find out more about the positions available, head over to our career site for all the details. It’s in Swedish as you might imagine.

The post Welcoming Markus Liljedahl as Pingdom’s latest frontend dev appeared first on Pingdom Blog.

Today we’re very excited to welcome the latest addition to the Pingdom team, John Karlsson. He joins Pingdom as a designer, and he will put his experience and talents, focused on digital design, into working on Pingdom’s products and other projects.

John comes from Valskog, a city not that far from the Pingdom HQ in Västerås, Sweden. Design was always in his blood, and he used to draw something all the time, on paper or on whatever else he could lay his hands on.

Digital design entered John’s life in his early teens in the form of Photoshop, probably version 7, and he’s not looked back since. The web quickly became a natural focus for John’s design work and that carries through to today.

After studying design in high school, followed by digital media at university, 8 months working with a production agency in New York, and working with mobile applications, he has now joined Pingdom.

Perhaps Pingdom would be a good fit for you

Are you looking for new challenges? Pingdom might be the place for you! We’re expanding fast, but there’s still room for many more super geeky, talented and fun people in our team.

As a part of the Pingdom team, you could help us accomplish our mission of making uptime and performance monitoring even easier and more available to the entire world. And as if that was not enough, you will have a choice of what crazy maxed out and packed computer you want to run – Linux, Mac, or Windows.

To find out more about the positions available, head over to our career site for all the details. It’s in Swedish as you might imagine.

The post Introducing John Karlsson, new designer at Pingdom appeared first on Pingdom Blog.

This drastic measure was put in place by the Indian government to curb the spread of rumors and inflammatory material concerning recent violence in Assam, India. Many websites have also been blocked for the same reason. It is a complicated situation, but basically the Indian government is doing this in an attempt to limit civil unrest.

We’re Swedes, so it’s difficult for us to comment on this from the outside. What we are concerned about, however, is the technical side effect of this move.

The problem is that a lot of legitimate uses of SMS are crippled while this daily SMS limit is in place. For example, many SMS gateways are severely limited because of this, which means that web services like Pingdom can have problems delivering SMS alerts reliably to India.

We are working with our SMS providers to keep SMS alerts to India functioning properly, but we cannot guarantee SMS delivery while this restriction is in place.

If you are a Pingdom user living in India, we recommend that you make sure you have activated alternative notification methods for alerts, for example email, so you don’t risk missing any site downtime we detect for you.

Image via Shutterstock.

The post Temporary SMS restrictions in India appeared first on Pingdom Blog.

Today we’re very excited to welcome another backend developer to the Pingdom team. Johan Sköld comes from Västerås, Sweden, where the Pingdom HQ is located. With his experience in performance-focused programming and “just get it done” attitude, he will be a great addition to the Pingdom team.

Johan first got in touch with computers when he was in his first or second year in school. The school had PCs with Windows 3.1, but only one was connected to the Internet so it became quite popular, not just with Johan. It opened up a new world of possibilities, Johan said.

We fast forward a few years, and a friend of his had started programming, something that Johan also picked up because it seemed interesting. “I have always been interested in problem solving, and there’s lots of problem solving in programming,” Johan said.

Johan’s first real programming project was a program for his family’s home PC, which hid a folder and the files in it so the rest of the family couldn’t get access to them.

A continued interest in programming led Johan to studies in game programming. “You have to be very careful with what instructions you use,” he explained. This led to a keen interest in and dedication to performance and optimization.

Johan will now put that same dedication into his new role as backend developer at Pingdom. “I just want to get things done,” he added.

With that attitude, he’ll fit right in at Pingdom.

Is Pingdom a good match for you?

Pingdom is expanding fast and we’re still looking for many more super geeky, talented and fun people for our team.

If you like to be challenged to perform at a very high level, and work on products that affect real people all over the world on a daily basis, then Pingdom might be the perfect match for you.

We should also mention that you will have a choice of what crazy maxed out and packed computer you want to run – Linux, Mac, or Windows.

To find out more about the positions available, head over to our career site for all the details. It’s in Swedish as you might imagine.

The post Backend developer Johan Sköld joins Pingdom’s growing team appeared first on Pingdom Blog.

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).

We have also done some changes behind the scenes, updated the apps to use our REST API, and fixed a few bugs.

If you’re a Pingdom user and have an iPhone or an Android smartphone, we really recommend it. The apps are free, and work with all Pingdom accounts (including free accounts). You can check the status of your websites at any time, get push notifications about downtime, and now also get some additional help in troubleshooting your outages.

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