Monthly Archives: May 2016

MxToolbox Status Page

Every once in a while, we, like many other providers, go offline.  Sometimes, it’s on purpose, like when we add new features and rebuild the site.  Sometimes, it’s completely accidental, like when our datacenter has an outage*.  And, you’ve been patient with us when it happens even though we’ve given you little information, typically via Twitter.

Today, that changes.  Now, you can check on our status at any time through our new StatusPage.io account.  Simply go to MxToolbox.statuspage.io to view status.  You should get a page that looks like this:

statuspage.io

Any product related issues will be flagged so that you can keep informed on the topic.  Even with this new tool, we will continue to update our followers on twitter.  We just want you to have as much information as possible.

 

*On that topic, we’re working to limit the impact of datacenter outages in the future by moving more of our tools to the cloud.

Better Insights from Updated Charts and Graphs

Here at MxToolbox, we’re big fans of good graphs and charts that provide insights, show trends and give you decision-making information.  And, it always helps if they look good.

We’ve recently launched an update to all our charts and graphs for MxToolbox Professional users.  Now, paid users get graphs that are much more interactive with much more information. In short, this:

smtp_graph

Becomes this:

MF_graph

Each data set can be selected, deselected and the timeline adjusted right from the graph.  And, we think the new graphics are beautiful, too…

We’ve added some color to our monitor tagging system

If you are currently monitoring a large volume of IP addresses or hostnames for your organization or on behalf of your clients, one of the most important requirements is the ability to quickly group and identify related monitors. For that reason, we added the ability to create tags a few years back as a way to easily identify groups of related monitors. For example: if you needed to monitor blacklists for multiple clients, you can easily create a tag for each individual client and assign that specific tag to the monitors related to that client.

As there is a growing need quickly identify groups of related monitors, MxToolbox recently added the ability to specify a color for your tags.  Now, you can make it easy to visually identify groups of related monitors. After creating a tag you can assign it one of eight color types by selecting the color palette square next to your existing tags.

Screen Shot 2016-04-07 at 12.17.13 PM

To start adding color to your tags simply login to your account and visit the Tag Manager by selecting Tags from the black navigation menu.

Screen Shot 2016-04-07 at 12.18.39 PM

Tags are available to all monitoring accounts starting at our MxWatch Basic Plan and above.  We hope that tags, and now colored tags, will make it easier for you to do your day-to-day tasks with MxToolbox.

Availability Report: Uptime % and Downtime for all your monitors

These days website or app uptime is a crucial aspect to any business online. If your website goes down for any reason your customers and business suffers. MxToolbox Monitoring offers two ways to report on the uptime of your servers:

  • Uptime Reports
  • Availability Reports

Uptime Reporting for Web, DNS, and other critical services give you Summary Uptime and Downtime reporting to protect on each monitor.  Simply select the monitor to see how we protect your business and customer satisfaction.   Uptime monitoring tracks performance over time in order to compare how your server is performing today vs last month or last week.

Screen Shot 2016-04-07 at 1.02.40 PM

Our Availability Report allows you to view the Uptime %, Downtime, and displays the current status for all your monitors. The Availability Report allows you to specify the date range so you can recall historical Uptime/Downtime statistics and issues.  This is particularly valuable when you want to show upper management how well things have been running over the past quarter or year or justify additional expenditures for servers.  In addition, you can access specific monitors directly from the Availability Report to checkout current status and specific issues.

With our new Availability and Uptime Reporting, MxToolbox Monitoring gives you even more insight into how your servers, and business, are running.