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.

One of the features we love about RapidSpike is the sheer amount of data we collect about the performance of our customers’ websites. We are able to use this data to provide great insight into real user experiences and, crucially, how to improve those experiences. However not everyone has time to analyse that data, or knows exactly what to look for.

Looking through our company Slack channels, we use GIFs to respond to each other a lot. We use the Giphy Slack app to quickly add a witty or sarcastic response to someone (we like each other really). And we also know that a lot of our customers use our Slack integration to receive alerts, because who wants emails. Then one morning, this conversation happened – where else – but on Slack.

Here at RapidSpike we are committed to providing a high quality service, and as part of that we frequently release upgrades to our core software. So today we’re very pleased to announce our Intelligent Page Monitor (IPM) upgrades!

This week we have launched a major upgrade to our API Monitoring so you can now add Custom Headers. We have also extended the tool to monitor via PUT and DELETE. You can also add Custom Headers to your normal page monitors (HTTP GET).

RapidSpike the web and real user application monitoring, analytics and security solution based in Leeds have appointed Gav Winter as their new Chief Executive Officer.

A few customers mentioned they were looking at moving away from services such as Slack for their notifications and wanted to use Microsoft Teams instead, due to the integrated nature of the Office 365 platform. It sounded like a good thing for us to offer, so we now integrate with Office 365 and Microsoft Teams.

If WordPress and Joomla! rule the CMS World, then Magento is king of the eCommerce platforms. Which makes it the obvious addition to our powerful external Vulnerability Scanning service. We can now detect and notify you of any existing or breaking security issues with the core version of your Magento platform. In addition to in-depth checks for thousands of known software and configuration vulnerabilities for all major software products (e.g. PHP, Apache2, etc.) and operating systems (e.g.