New Performance Summary Report and Updated Public Reports

Web site developers spend a significant amount of time and effort optimizing the site so that it loads quickly and performs well for their visitors. All of that effort is wasted if the web server performs poorly. One of the key uses for website monitoring is keeping an eye on web server performance to make sure that piece of the visitor’s experience is working optimally.

We have implemented a new report to help with this task. The Performance Summary report shows the minimum, maximum, and average response time for a site over an hour. By default, the report shows the last 31 days of performance data. As with the results report, you can change the number of results shown by editing the number on the report’s URL.

Of course, this isn’t limited to just web site performance. This report is available for all monitoring on NodePing, so you can see the same thing for ping results, ssh checks, email checks, and the whole range of other service monitoring we provide. In particular, this type of information is useful in ping tests to routers to watch connectivity performance over time.

We have also adjusted the way our “Public” reports feature works. The summary and results reports are now available if you are logged in to your NodePing account, even if the “Public” access is turned off. The “Public” toggle still controls whether the report is visible to visitors who are not logged in. We also changed the URL’s to better reflect that it is the same report with a different format. The results reports are now all at /reports/results/ (although the old URL’s will continue to work). You can retrieve the data in JSON or CSV format by adding ?format=csv or ?format=json to the URL. For CSV output, you can add a file name to the URL as well for convenience (so the URL would end in /filename.csv?format=csv). Documentation can be found in our reports documentation.

We are continuing to work on improving and expanding our reports. Please let us know what you think, and what you want to be able to see from the monitoring reports. Our continuing goal is to make NodePing not only the most cost effective, but also the most useful monitoring service anywhere.