Web application response time monitoring

I’ve been out there looking for a simple and affordable online service that will give me web app performance monitoring for Scouta. Ideally, I’m looking for something that give more that simply working out if the server is up or down. There are lots of services that do that. That’s a bit simplistic for a web service where we have multiple servers running, and where response time to our visitors and members is pretty important in the user experience.

What I’m really looking for is something that works on response time across a bunch of requests, and when a modified average goes above some response time limit, I want to get an email and an SMS.

So, today I’m brewing up something in python that will test one or more URLs and will SMS and email me when this modified average goes above some limit I set.

Delivering emails is easy once we’ve detected a response time issue. For SMS, I’ve signed up with TextAnywhere to get SMS delivery from a http web service interface.

Media Object Metadata

One of the things I’m working on at the moment is to model a reasonably complete set of metadata associated with an online media object. This is to give us in Scouta the best internal representation of media objects that we can get, to help with recommendation generation, searching and content delivery and embedding.

The source for all this metadata? Well, we start with RSS 2.0, then add on the Media RSS extensions and the creative commons licensing extension.

Then add in the Atom Syndication Format. Then add in the data returned from who knows how many online media site APIs. Also ID3 tag information from MP3s and other embedded tags from other file formats.

There’s a bit to work through here, as you can see. I’ll try and post a summary here when I get something reasonably complete.

Scouta in Australian Anthill

There’s great article about our Scouta in the latest Australian Anthill.

The startup CTO/COO

So, these web ventures sure do a good job of using up all the slack time, which is why posting here has been normally infrequent.

Perhaps I’ll write a bit here about just what’s going on in Scouta for me and just what sorts of things I end up working on day to day wearing my two hats, technical and operations.

Here’s kind of a list off the top of my head:
Tech

• Manage new development. That means:

• getting some consensus amongst the team about features we need to do next;
• trying to pick stuff that is doable so things get moving, avoiding the really hard stuff or invisible stuff;
• working out what we can do later;
• keeping focus in the team on the next goals;
• trying not to get sidetracked by things that don’t really matter;
• keeping development linked to the community/member/customer need;
• Try and maintain a technical vision that is longer than a few weeks away;
• Test things before release and encourage the rest of the team to do that too;
• Be aware of standards and technologies out there; work out if they are important and need to be incorporated;
• Work with industry and standards bodies (like APML working group)

Operations

• Make sure lots of things happen, like:

• Backups
• Servers get paid for
• Stats are collected
• Logfiles are kept
• DBs are backed up/replicated
• Automated email logs are scanned
• Check site security

• Check things like:

• Can people join up?
• Are outgoing emails working
• Are servers up
• Are response times reasonable

Manage:

• setup and config of new servers
• relationships

Wow, that’s enough. That explains why i’m busy :-)

Actually, I don’t do all of this on a daily basis and I do get to dip into the code itself a fair bit. At the moment I’m doing a lot of work on Scouta’s incoming and outgoing RSS. Metadata. It is all about metadata.

Scouta to Twitter: “G’Day World”

Given all the current Twitter madness and the fact they have a nice easy API, it was time to get Scouta talking to twitter.

And a couple of hours later it was done.

So, now, once in a while, currently hourly, Scouta picks a random newly-added fave media item and sends a link to twitter.

You can follow scouta on twitter to see the updates there.
And one of the first things it posted to twitter was a newly added podcast interview that Rich and I just did for Cameron Reilly’s G-Day World podcast.  As it should be :-)

Scouta launched!

We’ve launched scouta.com, our new online video and audio recommendation service.  Please go over and take a look and join up.  Members have more fun!

It was a big push to the launch and then I had a scheduled, booked holiday at Rottnest Island for a few days.  So…  I called and occasionally dared to go online via the mobile at £7.50 per MB (thanks T-mobile.. you’d think they were hand-crafting each bit at a price like that)

There’s been a lot of blog and press coverage..  See a summary on the Scouta blog.

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