When an outage hits your service, everybody starts talking. Your engineers are talking about what caused the problem, and how to fix it; your management is asking about when it’ll be fixed; and your customers are telling the world that they’re not happy. But there’s an even more important conversation you should be having: communicating with your users about the issue.
Welcome to 2020, where Google Drive can fail for some of you but not others, you can’t access your passwords, and you can’t withdraw cash on vacation. This stranded on a desert isle dream was reality in the month of January, which saw drama in the financial services and internet infrastructure sectors. January’s downtime reinforces just how connected we have become, and how reliant we are on infrastructure that can seemingly fail on a whim.
Synthetic monitoring takes care of all of the small interactions on our website that QA can’t catch. If you’re building an application for the web, a transaction check is an integral part of proactive downtime resolution. What we call transaction monitoring, or a transaction check, is a set of instructions that a probe server follows.
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.
