Announcing SolarWinds Observability

Last Saturday evening, the Earth Hour organization encouraged people and businesses to turn unused appliances and computers off during one hour. As a global uptime monitoring service with access to 35,000 sites and servers all over the world, we decided to see if more web-connected devices than usual were offline (mostly servers managing websites).
We also issue a challenge to network administrators across the world.

If you’ve seen the movie Burn After Reading, you’ll undoubtedly remember when one of the characters, totally exasperated by the utterly confusing mess that has built up over the course of the movie, simply states, ”What a clusterfuck.”
We stumbled across this picture the other day, suitably named just that: Clusterfuck.

Just as it did with IPv4, the US Department of Defense has managed to get its hands on a huge chunk of the addresses of its successor, IPv6.
The US DoD has a /13 IPv6 block (the smaller the number, the larger the block). No one else in the world is even close to that. The next-largest block after that is a /19 block (which is already huge). In other words the DoD owns a block 64 times larger than anyone else’s.
But just wait until you see how many IP addresses that really is. (Ok, the headline kind of gives it away, but we’ll expand on that.)

Is SaaS (software as a service) a trend that is gaining more and more of a foothold in IT departments, or is it doomed to be the bastard stepchild of traditional software? Jeffrey Kaplan from Computerworld set out to debunk five common myths about the SaaS model. He had several interesting points.

Millions of people who blog don’t want to deal with hosting their blog themselves, so they use a blogging service instead. There are many things that factor into the choice of blogging service, but one of them should always be site reliability. After all, if people can’t access your blog, it won’t get read.
For this survey we have monitored the websites of nine blogging services for a period of four months to see how much downtime they have. The included services were Typepad, Blogger, Wordpress.com, Blogster, Blog.com, Vox, Squarespace, Windows Live Spaces and LiveJournal.

We got tired of not having a good cheat sheet at hand to convert uptime percentages to downtime and vice versa, so we made one. Hopefully you will find it useful (I know we will).
You can download the PDF version here.
Print it out and use it as a reference when you need to quickly check how much downtime in a month 99.5% uptime actually allows for (just an example). It’s very handy. All information on just one page!
You’ll also find a smaller version inside this post, for your convenience.

Is the Internet rapidly becoming less of a safe, free and open place for our ideas, opinions and communication? One could convincingly argue that it is.
Here is what the situation looks like today, with some countries attempting to control the Internet and many monitoring everything on it. We also discuss what you can (and should?) do about it.

Digg had an outage today that was most likely the result of the ongoing migration of Digg’s servers to a new data center.
That didn’t stop people from wondering what was going on when the site went offline, as you could see for example on Twitter.

One of the latest software errors that had widely noticed consequences was Google’s Gmail outage in February. The problem in that case was, according to Google, a bug in the software that distributed load between its different data centers.
The Gmail outage only resulted in people not having access to their email for a few hours. No one got killed. Nothing exploded. It was an inconvenience, and while it was a significant inconvenience for some of Gmail’s users, it was still just that: an inconvenience.
This article is about some of the more dire consequences of software errors through the years. Incidents that make the Gmail outage seem rather trivial.

Submarine communication cables are the carriers of nearly 100 percent of all the mails, tweets, pasta recipes and other digital communications across the oceans. They connect every continent except Antarctica.
We also find them to be chewy, entangling, fast, file-sharing and an achievement. In brief, we are fascinated by these high-powered garden hoses and we have compiled some interesting facts about them.

Social networks are getting huge. So big, in fact, that many of them are competing in size with some of the largest countries in the world.
To give you (and us) a nice and visual overview of how today’s social networks stack up against countries in terms of sheer size, we have put together this chart.
Head on in to check it out!

We just wanted to share the magnificent and very extremely important news that Pingdom now has more than 100 followers on Twitter (since yesterday).
A long way to go still (we started very recently), but it’s nevertheless a tiny little milestone that we thought might be fun to share with you. Baby steps. 🙂
Did we mention that you can follow us (the Pingdom team) on Twitter…?

2009 looks set to be a break-through year for Twitter. This article will show that interest for Twitter is skyrocketing outside the US, and also where this is happening.
To be able to examine the worldwide buzz about Twitter (the general interest level per country, if you like) we have looked at Google search data for searches made so far in 2009. This gave us a fresh perspective on the current trends.

Last week the BitTorrent site Mininova was hit by a large-scale DDoS attack that caused a total of 14 hours of downtime. Regardless of what you think about torrent sites, this was an interesting example of how a website can be incapacitated by a DDoS attack.
We chose this example to illustrate the effect of a DDoS attack because Mininova shared some relevant information about the attack, especially a very telling traffic graph from their Internet connection. This coupled with some Pingdom monitoring data gave us a chance to look closely at the effects of a DDoS attack.

IPv6 adoption is going so slow that it has become a crisis in the making for the entire Internet. Three years from now there will be no IPv4 address space left. IPv6 needs to be fully adopted by then, but currently only 4% of the Internet supports IPv6.
This for a process that was expected to be done by 2007.

Sooner or later, every site or application will fail. However the consequences depend not only on how the failure is managed but also on how it is communicated. Recently the web hosting company Media Temple and even Google have well illustrated how hard it is for modern connected organizations to respond quickly enough to system outages. Here’s a suggested crisis checklist and notes on the difficulties of always practicing it.

Since it launched in 1998, Google has become one of the true giants of the Internet. These days, Google has data centers all around the world and hundreds of thousands of servers. The sheer size of Google today makes it very interesting to look back at its humble beginnings as a small research project called Backrub at Stanford University.

If you missed that Google had a 2.5-hour Gmail outage yesterday, you were probably hiding under a rock, or possibly in one of those sensory deprivation chambers. Every major tech blog and news outlet was on it (not to mention Twitter users).
It was night-time in the US, which limited the impact there, but the rest of the world wasn’t so lucky. For example, in Europe the outage started at 9:30 in the morning.
Google has now put a number on how much the potential productivity loss for Gmail users was worth.

There are now 177 million domain names across all top-level domains, which is an increase by 16% (24 million domain names) compared to a year ago.
These numbers are from the latest Domain Name Industry Brief, a quarterly report from Verisign about the growth of the domain name industry. Verisign has been doing this report a few years now, so we went back and looked at the data for 2006 and 2007 as well so we could show a wider time frame than just 2008 (to see trends, etc).

When it comes to the ability to do damage to a company, few employees have more power than sysadmins. Deep system access and inside knowledge is a necessary part of their job, but when things go bad between employee and employer, some very sensitive situations can arise.
Here are six real-world cases of “sysadmins gone wild” that all ended up in court.