Tag Archives: upgrade

Big news! Lots of changes!

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!

Uptime tests comparison – rebuild and enhanced

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)

 

 

Closer and closer to our fresh new web app

Road to the new web app

As was mentioned before, AgentSlug.com is getting to be refreshed with new functionalities like content checker (Full content test). Since we are also working on a brand new web app, it’s a good time to give you some heads up on the current development status.

Full Content Test

Currently, we offer uptime monitoring tool for your website, but this soon is going to be expanded. Full Content Test is currently in extensive testing process. There was a huge amount of work to make all the back-end performant and reliable. This work is mostly done. We still adjust few things and fixes issue which are popping out from time to time during the tests, but it’s quite close being fully available for all the customers.

With Full Content Test, you can set up a test for your entire website which will periodically crawl the website looking for dead links for pages and resources like javascript or images.

It’s already being heavily tested with some of our customers and so far it looks promising and quite handy.

The new web app, new design!

Since current web app is quite old, and the code base is starting to be rotten,  a decision has been done to start new focusing on the user experience and usability first.

This takes some time, but we believe it’s worth the effort since we already received some feedback from you that things should be changed.

This is happening right now.

The core functionalities are already there, we are focusing now on great onboarding experience and easy access to your data.

By the way, the new web app is much, much faster.

When all the functionalities of the old UI would be implemented in the new application, we will start a migration process.

All our users have access to the alpha version at the moment. A “secret” link can be found in the news section of your current dashboard.

As always we are waiting for your feedback!

What will change?

From the functionality perspective, not much (except the full content test of course, as the new feature).

In a new version the design changes drastically, we use minimal CSS to make your experience platform native as possible. The website will also react faster (client-side rendering, API calls only) and everything you care to see will be updated without reloading the page.

Additionally, we added an opportunity to pay with a credit card which might please some of you, and what is probably the biggest win for our Polish customers since PayPal is not so popular as elsewhere. The new app is already bilingual (additional languages will be introduced later).

Where can I see it?

Just log in to your account and find a link in the news section (sidebar). Please note this is still alpha, everything can still change, including some design decisions.

Release date

The final release date is not clarified yet, but the plan is to start the migration process for all the customers in next 2 months. The first public version is close, but migration won’t start until all wanted features are there for you in the new web app.

Winter upgrades

During the winter we made some adjustments to our service and currently we are happy to announce them.

Compare your uptime tests

AgentSlug.com - comparison - response by country

Since couple of days you can compare your uptime monitoring test results on http://agentslug.com/compare/ page.

Currently this feature is kind of a beta and for performance reasons we limit you comparison to maximum 6 tests and 3 months for each compare report.

Additional options for your test

AgentSlug.com - add new test

For special request of one of our clients, we expanded test options to new possibilities to customize:

  • User Agent (this way you can set your own User Agent for test instead of using AgentSlug.com one)
  • Follow redirects – if enabled, test will accept up to 5 following redirects. If the last response will be still redirect response, checker will consider it as a downtime

We also did some minor adjustments in our back-end to make everything faster and also to prepare the system to work with new iOS app which will be available this year.

As always, we encourage you to send us any feedback. We make this service for you and we will be more than happy to make it even better.

Low account and zero account notifications tweak

Fresh, spring update

Tuning up the notifications

Recently we were working on another feature that may greatly improve your user experience with our service.

In order to meet your expectations, we’ve changed our low account and zero-account notifications.

How to disable notifications?

In fact it’s quite simple. You need to pause or delete all your active tests and then you’ll no longer receive any message.

Secondary email, quick settings link and more

New features you’ll love

Last couple of weeks we’ve been tuning up the AgentSlug.com to make it even better, faster and more reliable. We’re also preparing ourselves to do a big pivot of the app by adding some cool functionalities.

Aside of planning and wireframing the big v 2.0, we’ve already made some new features which seem to be a must-have as soon as possible.

All features listed below are available since today.

Secondary emails

After the upgrade, every website test (monitoring) can be labeled with additional, secondary (alternative) email.

When site is down (or up), AgentSlug.com will send a notification to the secondary email. Even if you set “email notifications” off in your account settings. Secondary email attribute is fully independent.

User story

I’m monitoring (personally) dozen of websites within AgentSlug.com uptime monitoring service. Not all of them are important to me nor my client. Some are just triggered to grab some data from the world.

For example, after we had deployed Ukraine-Russia cyber war monitoring I got flooded with up/down notifications from monitored websites. There were so many emails, that I was forced to turn the email notifications off to my whole account to not get flooded to death.

Now, with a secondary email feature, I still have email notifications turned off as a global setting. However, I set a secondary email to every important website.

Turn off email notifications within notification itself

If you’re a hardcore AgentSlug.com user, there is some probability that you get a lot of messages from the service.

Sometimes you’re aware of a problem with your site and don’t want to get more messages anymore.

Now, you can turn them off by clicking a “turn off” link. The link is valid up to two days and works even if you’re logged out.

Turning off the email alerts

Email notification turned off alert

Just in case you forget that you turned off email alerts, we will send you an email to remind you about that.

It would be sent no more often than once a month and only if one of your sites is down. If none of your site is down, you won’t get any message. Ever.