We’ve launched status badges that allow you to display the status of any alert rule on your own website. So, you might create this display on your own website…

Server	HTTP	POP3	FTP
Jupiter
Saturn
Venus

To embed the alert rule statuses in your pages, you can get the Status Badge HTML simply by…

1. Logging in at https://cp.trendics.com
2. Clicking Devices in the top navigation bar
3. Clicking on Manage Status Badge
4. Copying the displayed Badge HTML

You can also customize the images used for the status on the same Manage Status Badge form. Enjoy!

We’ve launched a Live Chat Provider Uptime and Latency section and a Shopping Cart Provider Uptime and Latency section at http://tools.trendics.com today.

Both sections have limited data initially but we’ll continue to gather data on major live chat providers and major shopping cart providers to compare their uptimes and latencies over longer and longer periods of time.

In addition, we decided to split out email hosting from web hosting at http://tools.trendics.com.

Let us know if there are other categories of online service providers you would like to see us launch.

Today, we launched a couple of new features designed to help troubleshoot intermittent connectivity problems…

• The new Auto Trace Route feature will automatically perform a trace route after a ping test fails.  The trace route output can be reviewed within the Alert History section of the Trendics Control Panel.
• The new Selectable Monitor Aggregation feature allows choosing within an Alert Rule how all the monitor results are summarized to compare to the alert trigger.  Users can now choose to perform a Median, Average, All, or Any calculation across the monitor results within the Alert Rule.  The Any calculation is the most sensitive triggering alerts when any failure is detected from any monitoring location and the All calculation forces all monitors to report a problem before an alert is triggered.  In most cases the Median calculation is the best compromise as this effectively requires at least 50% of the monitors to detect a problem before an alert is triggered.

In a follow-up post, we’ll discuss how to combine these features to troubleshoot intermittent connectivity problems.

Today, we launched DNS and FTP Connection tests.  Within the Devices section of the Trendics Control Panel, you can now choose Add DNS Test or Add FTP Connection Test in the device action menus.

The DNS Test allows specifying a name server to be tested, a query to execute, and an answer to verify the result.  This DNS Test can check if a DNS server is responding and can also confirm that a domain continues to resolve correctly.

The FTP Connection Test allows specifying a host, a port, and receive text to confirm an FTP server is responding properly to connection requests.

We launched a new and improved design for www.trendics.com today.  In addition, we reworked the Benefits section and added a new Guarantees section.

We’ve had a busy week launching three new features this week…

• Last Result shows the Uptime/Latency or Error from the last execution of each test within the Devices section of https://cp.trendics.com
• Assign Service Provider allows assigning a Monitored Test to a third-party service provider (like a hosting provider).  In conjunction with the new Hosting Provider Uptime and Latency Tool, this will help keep hosting providers accountable for providing quality service.  Within the Devices section of https://cp.trendics.com click on Assign to Service Provider in the More Action menu next to a Monitored Test to assign a monitored test to a service provider.
  
• Hosting Provider Uptime and Latency Tool allows reviewing the uptime and latency of hosting providers.  The source of this information is the individual tests setup by users that have been assigned to a specific hosting provider.  Click here to view this tool now.

As always, your feedback is welcomed and appreciated.

Today, we made the following changes to our Free and Pro Editions…

• Increased from 1 to 5 the number of 15 minute tests included in the Free and Pro Editions
• Increased from 5 to 10 the number of 15 minute tests included in a $14.00/month purchase
• Discontinued the 60 minute tests to simplify the pricing model, simplify the UI, etc

All existing customer accounts have been updated to have more 15 minute tests per the changes above and all customer tests setup for 60 minutes have been upgraded to 15 minutes.

We’d like to see Trendics become the most popular server monitoring solution and believe these changes combined with our continued product development efforts will make that happen.

Today we added an Examples section to the www.trendics.com website.  This new section outlines three common server monitoring scenarios, shows how Trendics could be configured for each scenario, and shows the cost to use Trendics for each scenario.

Alert Aggregation allow you to receive a single notification containing multiple alerts. For example, if you operate 20 servers all at the same host and have setup POP3, SMTP, and HTTP checks on all 20 servers, then most monitoring services would send you 60 notifications when your host has a problem — that is crazy and quite distracting when you are trying to resolve the issue with your host (and you also get 60 more notifications when your host resolves the problem).

Now with Trendics, you can enable Alert Aggregation on a contact which will cause all alerts within a specified time period to be combined into a single notification. So, in the example above, instead of receiving 60 notifications for each downtime alert, Alert Aggregation would allow you to receive a single notification that summarizes the 60 downtime alerts.

To use Alert Aggregation, simply login at https://cp.trendics.com, click on Users in the top navigation bar, edit one of your Contacts and select an Aggregate Alert Period for the Contact. For example, if you select 2 minutes for the Aggregate Alert Period, then Trendics will wait for 2 minutes after the initial alert before sending the notification and will include all other alerts received in this 2 minute period. in the notification.

This was a highly requested feature and we believe this will make a big difference to those of you monitoring a large number of servers.

We’ve launched a free new tool that enables executing a trace route from our 10 independent monitoring servers around the US. This is useful for webmasters and system administrators to better identify the extent of connectivity problems. This tool is especially useful when you think your site is down due to a problem with your host and your host thinks everything is fine on their end.

The trace route tool is located at…

http://tools.trendics.com/trace-route

You can also use a shortcut syntax to launch trace-routes for specific hosts like this…

• http://tools.trendics.com/trace-route/www.google.com
  
• http://tools.trendics.com/trace-route/www.digg.com
• http://tools.trendics.com/trace-route/www.trendics.com

For those interested in web development, this trace route tool uses the YUI Connection Manager to make asynchronous calls to the server to initiate the trace routes and to retrieve the trace route results.

We are also considering integrating this trace route tool with our server monitoring service to automatically email the trace routes from our 10 monitoring locations to you when you have a server failure.