Pingdom Site Uptime and Performance Monitoring, now RUM

Pingdom.com is getting really good at their trade. For uptime and response time monitoring, Pingdom is a quick win for any size website. Does a great job, and Pingdom has racked up some big name customers, touted on their home page, like Microsoft, Dell, Disney, Google, Apple and many more. Everyone is using Pingdom, they have an easy to learn API so everything can be automated, the pricing is a great value, from 1 site to hundreds of sites. My only complaint is the lack of beacon out alerting. Email, SMS, Twitter, iOS, Android are adequate for a small shop with just a few folks on call, but what about the bigger shops? How about integration into Pager Duty? Pager Duty’s article explains how to do it, but it’s email based, which makes me cringe. That’s great that Page Duty has found a way to make it work, but I’d like to see Pingdom make a reverse API option, where they’ll call our API to relay the alert.

I just noticed they now have Realtime User Monitoring (RUM) added to their lineup. Nice. The dashboard is really very nicely done. I’m pretty excited about this addition to Pingdom and can hardly wait to see how it pans out for them and the industry. See, it’s a whole new game, getting beacon data for every pageload. If you’re familiar with the Pingdom API, you know they rate limit the number of requests you can do. This keeps their systems healthy, so nobody overruns it with too many queries. Okay, so now think about RUM, every pageview by site visitors turns into a beacon back to Pingdom to record. What if you’re doing hundreds of millions of pageviews per month, is Pingdom going to still just charge the $7/mo fee, one price fits all?

One price fits all is fine for uptime monitoring, b/c an uptime monitor checks the site every minute like clockwork, it’s 1440 polls per day, doesn’t matter if the site does 100 pageviews/mo or 1 billion pageviews per month, it’s still 1440 polls. Easy to calculate capacity needed. It’s going to be an eye opener when one of the big name customers, like apple, dell, amazon, decide to enable Pingdom RUM on their main sales page. Would be nice to extend a professional courtesy and contact Pingdom first, work out a deal, make sure they can handle it, and then do it. But will they? Or will one of them surprise Pingdom? Don’t see any mention of RUM limits in Pingdom’s TOS. They are either ready to do this in a big way, or they’ll get slammed and be reeling backwards and scrambling to place limits, rate limit, or charge accordingly. They’re either incredibly prepared and well ahead of the competition, or incredibly brazen. Either way, I’m in awe of Pingdom.

For low volume sites, like mine, I’m sure it’s nice and easy. In any case, I’m pretty excited to see it. I also like, I mean love, the incorporation of configurable Apdex thresholds. APDEX is something I’ve been studying and practicing professionally for 7 months, and to see it pop up on Pingdom, well, lets just say I got excited. Don’t know if the world at large is ready to understand Apdex, but Pingdom has done a great job of making it super simple with their intuitive interface. Pingdom RUM users will get the power of it at a glance and come to appreciate it more.

Here’s a screenshot thumbnail after just a few minutes of running Pingdom RUM (click to enlarge):

pingdom-rum-dashboard2

Just to show off a bit more, a couple banners for uptime and response time of this site, because why not, I have nothing to hide:

Response time Report for KoopmanME: Last 30 daysUptime Report for KoopmanME: Last 30 days

And, here’s my public pingdom page

Comments are closed.