At last. It’s taken many weeks to progress on this update to the website.
But. It’s live.
Running right now is a complete different system for testing for outages. It fixes many of the failures of the previous system, by testing DNS, by allowing for a simple missed beat, by testing in details finding any problem it can with a provider we monitor (within reason).
What a pain it has been to get this live though. I didn’t put much planning into the website when I started coding it, back last year, and went with a simple approach of testing providers, and basically using a more ‘boolean’ approach.
The new testing incorporates several checks, and can log detail checks.
The website will catch up soon with the changes made. Many of the database changes required took a fair bit of time to change the website over, but at last, I’m very happy to have this live now. It’s just one bigger task of the monitoring system done. It will hopefully ensure we get no more of the short outages we have seen pop up and disappear, but they could still happen, which would just highlight networking issues with either the local provider or the far end provider being monitored. Not a lot we can do about that.
The new system is also more portable, and not a pain to setup extra copies. So I plan to look at doing a more redundant method of monitoring in the future, setting up somewhat of a national monitoring network, to get results from more than one location.
That’s very future looking however.
The website overall needs many of the pages recoded. All the one touch fixes have caused the code to be a bit more messy than I care to have, and I plan to clean that up by recoding each page, and even getting rid of the tables approach.
I do wish to have a new layout for the site, because most of the content at this moment is ‘crammed’ into place.
Further, I want to add a web backend to the site to make changes to providers / adding providers easier.
And then after that comes a heap more web focused features, at the very least to enhance the user experience, at the most, to get the user to enjoy the site and miss breakfast to check the status of their VoIP Provider (joking :)).
Interesting data should be available by now with the outage data collected, such as the average number of outages per provider, and the average length of outages for each provider, as well for all providers.
I did clean up all the outages that were happening for the 60 seconds, since it is unfair to the providers to have outages logged that simply never happened and were resultant of a flaw in the monitoring that didn’t really start happening until a bug fix caused it.
I do plan to continue with the site more this week. I might actually recode many of those pages with this week, see what time I find at least. And naturally, the tests up ahead are related to checking monitoring, to determine if the new system is performing as I believe it will (I’ve tested it locally, but there’s big differences in spot testing and day to day long term testing).
Someone I’ve spoken closely with a lot thinks the website could even use forums. I don’t think they are needed at all, but he seems to think that forums on that site will give users the ability to discuss issues, and so forth.
I’m not convinced, I’m not adding forums at all at this stage.
The site will hopefully in this week, if not the coming WEEKS, get more changes, so much so that it might actually end up needing a different name to “describe” it.
The ISP monitoring section of the website has been down for sometime now, generally because the person who set that up has not appeared back online as far as I know for sometime, and I haven’t bothered fixing it.
I’m not convinced ISPs have large numbers of outages, though, I did indeed notice Netspace took the oppourtunity not so long ago to disconnect users. But in general, nearly all ISPs perform the same, the outages they have are so insignificant on a yearly scale, that the time they are down, you might as well as use to get fresh air anyway.
Anyway, I’m simply happy to have that new monitor live, and hopefully see some positive results from the time placed into it, and the bug testing done.
Enjoy!