Looking for a way to keep up on website performance best practices, load testing tips and all things related to the success of your websites and applications? Then join us for our new BrowserMob office hours.

We’re pleased to announce that starting October 7, SMEs from our Engineering, Professional Services, Customer Service and Sales teams are at your service for one hour on the first Friday of every month. Feel free to pick their brains and ask anything that’s on your mind. They’re happy to share success stories and lessons learned from their work with other customers.

Find full details on the new monthly tradition below:

What: First Friday Feedback, the official BrowserMob office hours

When: 9:00 – 10:00 a.m. PST, The first Friday of every month, beginning October 7

Where: Via WebEx (details to come once you register below)

Who: A diverse team of experts from various BrowserMob teams

How: Register here.

If you’d like to shoot our SMEs a question or feedback ahead of time so that we can be sure to cover it on Friday, please send us an email. We look forward to seeing you there!

Stop by and see us in booth 201 at  Velocity.   Enter to win FREE monitoring or load testing! Plus, if you’re interested in learning how to build a performance testing framework for your web application in under a day, attend our workshop: Automated Web Performance Testing before 5pm, on Tuesday, June 14th.  Patrick Lightbody, founder of BrowserMob, will also be speaking at this show,  his topic: “From Inception to Acquisition: One Startup’s Journey through the Cloud”. Join us next week!

By the way … I am apparently the poster child for this event….

We apologize for the inconvenience but we’ve had several recent disruptions, some of extended length, to our services.  On Tuesday evening (5/17), we pushed out a release that caused this disruption and unfortunately, it manifested negatively yesterday. During this time,  you may have experienced either slow performance, or error pages reporting “Service Temporarily Unavailable”.

We are still investigating the root cause of this issue and the quality of the release. But in the meantime, we have rolled back to a more stable environment.   This is high priority for us and will notify you again once we have more information.

If you have any questions or comments, please contact us. Thanks for your patience.

Are you burning the midnight oil trying to finalize that mobile application or website with less than 24 hours before launch? If so, you’re not alone!

The night before a major mobile launch is often when every person involved in the initiative is on high alert, testing functionality and working to release it on time and fully tested for prime time.

This was the inspiration for our upcoming Twitter chat on Thursday, May 26, hosted by Webmetrics and led by the founder of BrowserMob, Patrick Lightbody.

Do you have questions about testing your mobile application before it goes live? Have you considered how you are going to monitor the mobile website’s performance once it goes live? Join us for our #MidnightRun Twitter chat to get answers to all your burning questions around mobile monitoring!

Additional details on the chat include:

Who: Patrick Lightbody, founder of BrowserMob and Director of Product Management for Webmetrics

Patrick has founded two companies in the website testing space, including BrowserMob and HostedQA. Additionally, he is a frequent contributor to open source software, particularly in the areas of Java web development and open source QA automation technologies.

What: Patrick Lightbody will be answering your questions related to global infrastructure considerations (i.e. load testing, monitoring, etc.) associated with launching a new application or mobile website.

Where: Twitter – #MidnightRun

When: 9:00pm – 10:00pm PDT on Thursday, May 26, 2011

How: Sign on to Twitter and tweet your question to @plightbo using the hashtag #MidnightRun. We’ll be monitoring the questions and tweeting out the answers.

Twitter Hashtag: #MidnightRun

We hope you can join us burn the midnight oil and provide some valuable insight to your peers!

Konichiwa Japan!

BrowserMob is pleased to announce that we have added a new agent in Tokyo, Japan. We’re excited to be able to offer our users this new location for load testing and website monitoring.

This will be our eighth location from which you can monitor web performance. For Load Testing, Tokyo will be our fifth location from which you can generate traffic. The Tokyo location will aid our Singapore location for the Asian geographic region. You can find more information on the other locations, and the corresponding IP address ranges here: http://blog.browsermob.com/2008/12/faq-what-are-the-ip-addresses-of-your-browsers/

Our agent locations are based on the AWS regions of our cloud-computing provider, Amazon EC2. They have noted that private beta testers who have been putting their new AWS region in Tokyo to the test have reported single digit latency (e.g. 1-10 ms) from locations in and around Tokyo. The beta testers were very pleased with the observed latency and performance, and we’re sure you will be too!

Be sure to let us know if you have any questions about the new location – we hope you will see the benefits of the new location soon.



After a long night of reviewing the data logs and trying to recover what we lost on 04/21, we anticipate that we can recover about 9 hours of missing data during yesterday’s outage. Obviously, we were hoping to be more successful and looking to recover 100% of the data. But for now, we are able to ascertain and recover the data lost between these time stamps:

• 04/21/2011 at 12:47AM PT to 2:36AM PT
• 04/21/2011 at 8:36AM PT to 3:47PM PT

We do know that Amazon Web Services posted a message on their status page at around  8AM PT notifying us that was a severe issue:

8:12 AM PDT Despite the continued effort from the team to resolve the issue we have not made any meaningful progress for the affected database instances since the last update. Create and Restore requests for RDS database instances are not succeeding in US-EAST-1 region.

So, here’s our next steps:

We will be putting resources – from engineering development to operational processes – in place to prevent this from happening again. In the next few days, we will be sifting through the recovered data and will be getting your reports and charts updated accordingly.

Again, we appreciate your patience!

Thanks and Happy Friday

We are happy to inform you that our monitoring services are now back online and our website is now stable.

Here’s the latest update:

• Washington DC is now enabled for load tests and monitoring.
• Access to web service APIs is now available.
• Charts and reports are now accessible.

However, from 1:00AM PT – 4:00PM PT today (04/21/2011), all reports, charts, and data relating to your monitoring services were disrupted. If you log in to your account now and view your reports or charts, you will notice a gap in your data. We want to ensure you that during this period, monitoring and alerting was not affected. You would have continued to receive downtime alerts.  In an effort to retrieve this data loss, we will be proactively sorting our raw logs and will do our best to backfill the reports and charts so it can be viewed in your account. We know that this information is imperative to your day-to-day activities, so it will be our #1 priority to get this done in the next few days.

We appreciate your support and patience with us today! In the meantime, if you have questions, please contact us so we can address your concerns immediately.

We have been experiencing a disruption in our monitoring services, due to an issue we’ve been wrestling with all morning: Amazon EC2 is having a severe service disruption. You can follow the progress here:  http://status.aws.amazon.com/.

We are working through these issues in conjunction with Amazon EC2’s updates. In the meantime, here’s the latest on our situation:

• Our website has some stability issues.
• We have disabled running load tests from Washington DC.
• At this time, we know that some monitoring data has been lost but still limited on the scope of the loss. We will do our best to retain what we can but our primary focus is to ensure that we get downtime alerts out to you.
• Monitoring is still continuing and alerts are still going out.
• You can still schedule and run load tests in other regions.
• You may have experienced validating your scripts for about a couple hours this morning.  Retry editing and saving your script, and it should validate.
• Our web services API for monitoring data is currently offline.

We will continue to update you as we know it. We sincerely apologize for the inconvenience. A monitoring system is only as good as the confidence you have in it, and do hope that you will continue to have confidence in BrowserMob monitoring as time goes on.

If you have concerns or questions, please feel free to contact us.

Hot off the press … Selenium 2.0b3 has just been released simultaneously for Java, .Net, Ruby and Python. This release focused on providing support for the next generation of browsers – specifically, IE 9 and Firefox 4.

For more information, check out the blog posting from the Official Selenium Blog.

As we continue to improve our load testing infrastructure and monitoring services, you may have noticed that some of your load tests never got off the ground yesterday (between 4:50 pm – 5:30 pm PDT on March 15, 2011). We apologize for the inconvenience and want to assure you that we have resolved the issue.

In the spirit of transparency, we wanted to let you know what happened and what we are doing to prevent future issues. You may recall that we were recently acquired by Neustar, Inc. and are now part of a family of web performance products. We are moving forward with the integration of our back-end infrastructure with Webmetrics, which will allow us to build better tools down the line. If all had gone according to plan, this particular update would have gone largely unnoticed by BrowserMob users, but unfortunately that was not the case this time around. There was a bug that went undetected in our development/staging environment that reared its head when we pushed the updates to production. We were able to roll back within the hour and only a few customers were affected.

We will continue to take measures to avoid this type of incident.  In the meantime, we are updating our staging environment to more closely simulate production and integrating a more robust Q/A plan into the development process. This will ensure that issues are quickly identified and resolved before they reach you.

We also wanted to mention that none of our monitoring services were interrupted during this outage. All checks and alerts are operating normally.