Author: Mark Kupfer

Network Services Monitoring

Dedicated IPv6 Monitoring Location Now Available

Dotcom-Monitor now offers a dedicated IPv6 monitoring location, which means that tasks being monitored from this location will not be able to resolve traffic across an IPv4 network, so if the communication cannot travel across an IPv6 compatible network, this location will return a failed monitoring result.

Now you can test IPv6 connections specifically from an “IPv6 only” location to ensure that your services are accessible via IPv6 only nodes. This is useful for testing IPv6 specific resolution because there are configurations available on different networking devices that may allow traffic between IPv4 and IPv6 nodes that will not work with IPv6-Only nodes. For example, it is possible that you may have a router on one end of the communication that attempts to send IPv6-Only traffic using a tunneling mechanism to tunnel IPv6 through an IPv4 only network while the router on the other end is not capable of extracting the IPv6 address from the IPv4 tunneled data.

Utilizing an IPv6 location also allows you to ensure that any APIs you use are capable of handling IPv6 communications. The IPv6 monitoring location will let you know if your application is not IPv6-aware by triggering an alert when the application is unable to respond.

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Dotcom-Monitor News

Using Dotcom-Monitor’s Services, NCM Online Finds Midsized Web Hosts are the Best

Leveraging Dotcom-Monitor services, NCM Online developed fact-based observations about the performance of 20 leading web hosts in June, and continues to test additional hosts throughout the year (the most recent update to the list was 8/2/2014). These tests include purchasing a shared hosting plan from each provider and gathering page-load speed averages and uptime percentages from at least 10 concurrent days using identical websites on each provider. This process provides 2 of the ten criteria NCM Online uses to rank different shared hosting service providers.

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Dotcom-Monitor News

New Features: Dashboards and Visual Traceroute

User Interface Update: There are several exciting new features along with some updated cosmetic changes to the Dotcom-Monitor user interface. Here is a brief overview of the changes: The color scheme has been updated to make the site easier to read. On the Device Manager (The first page you see when

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How To Monitor Voice Connectivity – Inbound Line & SIP Monitoring

Voice Connectivity is Critical. Your phone systems have gone down and you are unable to communicate with your customers. After several hours of troubleshooting you have managed to get the services up again but what do you do now? Whether you utilize a SIP based VoIP system, digital voice over T1 lines or POTS (plain old telephone service), those voice services need to be available.

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New Features to Test How DNS Caching Affects Your Website

The new DNS caching features at Dotcom-Monitor allow you to perform some interesting tests that show how DNS caching can affect your page load speed.

We realize that many organizations monitor their online services with a number different goals in mind, and so we listened to the feedback we received that some users want to include the DNS response time in their monitoring and some users want to be able to remove DNS response from their monitors.

How you wish to handle DNS response time in regard to your monitoring needs is up to you, but we want to take this opportunity to show the differences in how DNS response time affects website load using our new tools.

We ran a test monitoring YouTube from a single location in the midwest United States with three different DNS cache settings. A basic HTTP full page load on the YouTube front page resulted in some interesting, although not that surprising results.

Keep in mind the results will vary depending upon a number of variables such as which locations you are monitoring from, the time of day, the load on the DNS servers, and on the website servers.

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