Over the past few weeks we’ve been looking at feature requests on our Page Speed monitoring feature, and today we’ve released the next phase which introduces a wide range of improvement and new functionality.

Downtime occurs. It's an unfortunate fact of online life. No website is able to provide 100% uptime - even tech giants like Google suffer downtime, albeit very occasionally. So, some amount of downtime is inevitable, but how much is acceptable? This question is obviously subjective - downtime that's acceptable for one person may be intolerable for another. Therefore, we undertook a little research...

Today, we released version 2.0 of the Skylight Agent. 2.0 doesn't introduce any new APIs, but we did rewrite the SQL Lexer to support more varieties of queries. We also spent a lot of time on internal refactoring and improved our error logging. Since we follow semantic versioning, we also took the opportunity to drop support for some older dependencies and environments. Read on for more information about upgrading as well as some technical details on our internal changes.

We’ve added a new feature we think you’ll want to hear about—Single Sign-on. Uptrends is now compatible with Single Sign-on. Single Sign-on (SSO) is a great way to easily manage user accounts, improve productivity, and improve security, and now you can use SSO with Uptrends.

In part one of the OpenTracing blog series we provided a good OpenTracing overview, explaining what OpenTracing is and does, how it works and what it aims to achieve. One of the key aspects of OpenTracing is that it is vendor neutral, and also that OpenTracing is just a specification. In order to instrument an application via OpenTracing API, it’s necessary to have an OpenTracing-compatible tracer correctly deployed and listening for incoming span requests.

We are happy to announce a new bugfix release for Icinga Web 2. Official packages are available on packages.icinga.com. Community repositories might need a while to catch up.

Today we are releasing a new support version of Icinga 2.8, a small one to pass the time until 2.9. This release includes fixes for the InfluxDB and Elasticsearch features. Please note that Elasticsearch 6 support is coming with 2.9. In addition to the fixes we’ve added support for multiple check parameters for the check_nscp_api plugin and working sysconfig/defaults variables support, you’ll also find many documentation updates.

If your data center experienced an outage due to an ISP problem, the first thing you probably do is go to a terminal and execute your nifty command line tools. These tools give you a lot of information, textually. However, troubleshooting network outages aren't always easy, as slow connections or outages may be caused by issues outside your corporate network and parsing all this data is hard.