All posts by Szymon Nowicki

Story, Upgrades

Low sensitivity tests + No more google Sign-In

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Updates updates updates!

Winter is coming, let’s brace ourselves with product updates!

Low sensitivity uptime checks

Some of you have many tests that are pretty unstable. Some of those tests would raise an alarm few times a day. Usually the reason is a timeout from remote regions. For example if your server is in Europe and is not performing very well it’s possible that test servers in Australia would get high response times often exceeding our 10 seconds response time limit.

For some customers this is unacceptable and it should raise the alarm, for some customers it doesn’t really matter and they treat it as noisy false positives.

In order to mitigate this inconvenience, now you can set up your test’s sensitivity to “low”. “Medium” sensitivity is also fined tuned:

  • With “medium” sensitivity, alarm was off when we got 2 downtime confirmations from 2 different locations. Now it’s 3 downtime confirmation, from 2 different locations.
  • New “low” sensitivity triggers an alarm after 5 confirmations from 4 different locations.

Those numbers might be fine tuned in the future, please follow our Twitter account to track this. We won’t send you an email with such a minor change.

Please note this only affects alerting functionalities (Slack / e-mail messages). Registering downtimes and performance of your website is not affected by the sensitivity settings. Every downtime is detected from any region and counted in the uptime statistics. 

After some time your tests’ sensitivity might get change automatically if we consider them unstable. This won’t happen to customers in paid plans.

No more Google Sign-In support

Something has been added, something has been removed to keep the balance…

Google deprecated some APIs that have been in use by AgentSlug.com to make the Single Sign On work.

Due to pretty high effort planned in order to migrate to new APIs it makes more sense to sunset Google Sign In support instead.

When Google Sign-In was introduced to the product it was super important for security and user experience. Back then passwords managers with browser support were basically non existent. Now it has changed and every major browser supports you with keeping your passwords complex, unique and safe. Due this this and not that high use of the Google Sign-In at the moment, it is gone now.

If you have been using Google for logging in, please use the magic link functionality to log in to your account and set the password in your account settings (if you wish).

PS: Photo by Alexas_Fotos on Unsplash

Story, Terms changes

Pricing changes

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Since this project started in 2013 it was always a pay-as-you-go service without any price increase since the day 1.

Now, 7 years later, we have evaluated that model and came to a conclusion that we need some changes. Changes that would support this business better.

We’re not the biggest fans of a subscription model, but in this case we believe that this business decision is justified.

We’re using a “subscription” word a lot here, but it’s worth noting that as today, we will not offer recurring payments. You make all the payments explicitly, we won’t charge you automatically.

If a paid plan is not renewed manually, it will be converted to a free plan after the expiration date.

Free/premium plans
Starting from 2020-11-21 will offer three plans:
– Free – limited to 2 uptime tests with with 5 minutes test interval and 2 application monitoring tests and no extra features like custom user agent or additional notification emails.
– Lite – limited to 10 uptimes tests (1 minute interval) and 10 application monitoring tests.
– Full – limited to 50 uptimes tests (1 minute interval) and 50 application monitoring tests.

Prices are as follows:
– Free – well, free.
– Lite – 2€ per month or 10€ in a yearly payment
– Full – 5€ per month or 50€ in a yearly payment

We’ve made those plans by carefully analysing our competitors and we believe this is still the best deal on the market.

Release is scheduled on 2020-11-21.

During that day we will release all necessary changes to our servers, including small re-design of the web app, and we will start a process of migrating all accounts to the new business model.

Uptime testing and reporting will be affected during the release but it should not be longer than a few minutes.

We will send details regarding the migration of existing accounts in a separate newsletter.

We hope, that after reading this, you’d understand the reasons why the business model is changing and how this is going to improve the development of our service.

Shorts, Story

Content Test – end of life

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As of 1st of February AgentSlug.com is going to fully stop offering full content test product.

The main reason for that decision is that the quality of this product is not as good we would like it to be, also judging by the number of active users of this feature.

There are plans to make this product back, in a different form and technology later this year.

Please note that all current tests will continue working as scheduled until 25.01.2020.

All reports will be available as usual until 01.02.2020.

Story, Terms changes, Upgrades

Big news! Lots of changes!

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Big news! Lots of changes!

A lot has been changed recently and we’re happy to announce that we’re done with polishing our current products so it feels and looks better. We primarily hope it would also provide much better experience.

What changed in a short list:

– Dark mode!
– Website dead links scanner now sends notifications when finishes (Slack and e-mail).
– You get downtime reminders for 48 hours after incident (Uptime monitoring and application monitoring).
– Application monitoring will no longer be free of charge since it goes out of beta.


Details

Dark Mode

It’s not about black or white hat. It’s our app which now adjusts to your system settings. If you system is dark and your browser supports it (if not, it soon will) our app will become dark automatically. That’s what we call true Responsive Web Design!

If it makes you want to test it right now, please check our blog post which explains all why’s and how’s.


Beware: you might get more notifications from us!

In a few minutes after this e-mail campaign is sent out to you, we will roll out all changes regarding e-mail and Slack notifications. That is:
– Slack/Email report after Content Test (Website Dead Links Scan) is finished
– Slack/Email downtime reminders for uptime tests and application monitoring.

There’s no need to describe broadly the Content Test report notification (simple notification with a link to your new report), but you might want to read more about downtime reminders.


Downtime reminders

So, we’ve build application monitoring to scratch our own itch. 

We have many workers and scripts engaged to make AgentSlug.com do what it advertises. Crawlers, dispatchers, cleanup jobs, alert watchers and more.

Every now and then things go south and fail to run. Of course we monitor our logs but that doesn’t cover every possible failure.

This is why we’ve built Application Monitoring.

Every time the worker finishes a job successfully, it sends a signal to our system like “hey, I do my job as promised”. If it doesn’t send a signal, someone has to check what’s going on.

But what if the downtime notification comes during a time that no one watches it? What if it’s hidden between hundreds of other messages?

Then it might stay unnoticed for a while.

To provide solution for that exact problem, we’re happy to announce that for 48 hours since downtime alert starts we will send you a reminders about that.

Those reminders are sent in asymmetric intervals: 0.5h, 1h, 3h, 6h, 12h, 24h, 36h, 48h so if you decide to ignore it for a while, we will not bug you every half an hour.

Additionally, for uptime tests downtime, we will deactivate the test if it stays down for 49 hours.

Application monitoring out of beta

Last announcement to make, application monitoring is no longer free of charge. From now on it will cost 1€ net per month. 

Thank you!

As a last words here: thank you for reading this email so far down. And thank you for staying with us!

Upgrades

Let’s go dark!

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There was time, where CRT screens were ubiquitous. In this time dark websites were pretty common since the way CRT screen emits light worked pretty well with dark colours.

Then LCD screens came into every hour. Those were pretty bad compared to CRT, especially in terms of showing true shades of grey. This was the end of black websites popularity.

Dark went underground.

Now, with near perfect LCD screens, and even better OLED dark pallets are having a big comeback.

iOS, macOS, Windows, Android – almost everyone supports dark themes in their systems. This is the last moment to make websites and webapps truly responsive also in that dimension.

We are happy to announce that with CSS prefers-color-scheme we just did that with our main website and web app.

What does it mean to you? (2019-06-16)

Well, if you’re macOS user you can use it right away since it’s running for a while and all major browsers (except Chrome is still catching up) adjust the colours automatically.

If you’re a windows user, it might not work at all still. You can try latest Chrome though.

For Android, Chrome should adjust accordingly.

Uncategorized

Asia-Pacific – new locations

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Quick announcement: we’re monitoring around the globe!

New locations for http uptime tests are deployed.

  • Sydney, Australia
  • Singapore
  • Seoul, South Korea
  • Tokyo, Japan

Those four locations give all our users better statistics regarding the website performance around the globe.

New locations in europe will follow soon as well as small enhancements in the web app. Stay tuned!

Cover photo by Keith Zhu on Unsplash

Shorts, Story, Upgrades

Uptime tests comparison – rebuild and enhanced

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Short update

Uptime check comparison page is just released together with some small UI/UX fixes and enhancements!

If you haven’t seen it yet, just log in or register to our app!

How to get this?

Simply find the test you want to compare and click the compare button.

How to compare?

You can compare single test (for countries comparison) or up to three tests at the same time.

For our internal uptime checks, it looks like our main web app is loads faster without CDN ? (as you can see in the movie)

 

 

Story, Upgrades

Product update – All the new things

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New quarter, major changes!

Content Checker goes live

Content checker (full website scan) is getting out of an experimental stage. It means we will start charging for those tests, starting this weekend.
If you don’t want to be charged, please remove your tests before Sunday.

Pricing for those tests is as mentioned on the home page: 0.0001€ per unique link (1€ for a website with 10000 links).

We keep the crawler links limit for now (10000 links is current max capacity). This will change in the future.

Uptime checker granularity (time intervals)

Thanks to an awesome feedback we received from one of our new customers (thanks again ❤️), we’d like to announce that it will be possible to set up an uptime test with new time intervals: 2, 3 and 5 minutes cycles.

We plan to release this change later this week.

Application monitoring

We will introduce another, third AgentSlug.com product – application monitoring. It’s something like a reverse uptime check. For this product, AgentSlug.com doesn’t call you to check if the site is live, but your application is calling us to notify that something meaningful happened.

It’s already being used for our internal health check processes. We will explain this feature further on inside.agentslug.com when it will be closed to launch.

We will support nodejs first. If you happen to have some nodejs processes that do something important to you, feel free to contact us for an invitation to closed beta tests.

Further depreciation of the old UI

The old UI is in the maintenance mode for a couple of months, now it’s the time to close it entirely. The only feature which is not moved to the new UI is the PDF reports generation. Please copy them, if you wish. We won’t support this feature anymore since the default browser PDF generation good enough for sharing the reports as prints.

Sincerely,
Simon Nowicki
Head of the AgentSlug.com

 

p.s. Awesome cover photo by NeONBRAND on Unsplash

Story, Upgrades

London Babe!

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We just started expanding our locations by adding two new servers.

One in N. Virginia (US – East) which will replace our current NY server.

Second in London which also means we’ve just added our first UK location!

More locations are coming soon. If you wish to see some specific country on our list, please contact us directly.

All AgentSlug.com servers list is always available on the page below.

Servers list

ps. Many thanks for the awesome London picture go to Susan Yin.