Sometimes the Outage is Your Fault
On Friday, I wrote a post called Playing the Outage Blame Game, about powerful figures criticizing the utility companies for failing to bring power back quickly enough in the wake of the October 29th freak snow storm in the Northeast that dropped heavy wet snow onto the region breaking trees and bringing down power lines. It’s nine days later, and there are still people in Massachusetts and Connecticut without power and they aren’t very happy with the utility company responses. On Friday, I wrote about the freak nature of the storm, about the extent of the widespread damage to...
read moreBad Stuff Can Still Happen to Prepared Companies
It happens to the best of companies. You might have all your monitoring bases covered and all your carefully crafted disaster plans in place, but sometimes no matter what you do, outages happen. If you doubt that, look at the world’s biggest cloud companies, the ones whose livelihood depends on being up and you’ll see they have some very well-publicized outages. Unlike say Amazon, Google or Microsoft, yours might not be so public, but it doesn’t mean the people affected are any less frustrated. The difference is your users probably aren’t on Twitter complaining and the...
read moreSoftware and Monitoring Tool to Blame in Two Blackouts
There were two major blackouts yesterday around the US. One affected Tampa, FL and the other affected several states in the Southwest and Mexico. According to reports, these outages were caused by a software glitch and a monitoring tool. Let’s start with the blackout in Tampa, Florida, which according to reports left more than 1 million people without power for more than 5 hours during the day yesterday (and some were still without as evening approached). According to a report on the Suncoast News web site, the outage was caused by a software glitch and redundant backup systems failed...
read moreCell Phone Networks Get Disaster Prep
In the aftermath of Hurricane Irene this past weekend, cell phone service took a big hit. In some areas, there are outages, while in others, there is service, but the bandwidth is being used by emergency personnel who get priority in a situation like this. But as we look at the state of cell phone service, it’s held up remarkably well and that’s because the cell networks know how to prepare for a disaster. And you could learn from them, Grasshopper, just by paying attention to how they do business. As we wrote the other day in Mobile News Sites Stay Up During Hurrican Irene,...
read moreMobile News Sites Stay Up During Hurricane Irene
When Hurricane Irene hit the east coast last weekend, it brought with it, heavy wind and rain that took out cell networks in some areas. Yet most mobile news sites were able to stay up in spite of the conditions and the stress to the networks during the storm. It’s a lesson you should take away from the storm. Regardless of the conditions, you still have to work hard during these events to ensure your mobile site stays up because it may be the only access to your web site or application. It’s worth noting that according to cloud monitoring company, Keynote Systems, most mobile...
read moreFree Real User Monitoring
This blog is sponsored by Correlsense,
the maker of SharePath RUM Express -
a free tool that provides a real-time
view into the actual experience of
your end-user, including availability,
response times and service levels.
