MANAGED SERVICES cloud
Millions of people rely on the information they receive from Wikipedia and other Wikimedia projects. If Wikipedia is down, or slow, research being conducted by professionals and students all over the world can come to a halt. Availability is also critical to the volunteer community, because access is necessary for making contributions to content.
“If the site is down, our editors can’t edit, and no new content can be added or updated,” said Woo. “Moreover, our developers can’t access the API services they depend on to create applications that enable visitors to extract information from us.”
Woo realized that 24/7 monitoring of every piece of the infrastructure was the only way to ensure the projects remain available. Additionally, monitoring capabilities would allow service performance and availability information to be published easily, providing greater transparency to build and retain the trust of contributors and visitors.
“Transparency is a big part of who we are as an organization,” said Woo. “We have an obligation to make information about how we operate available to our user community. To do this, we need a monitoring tool that can keep track of everything 100% of the time and provide complete visibility into performance and availability metrics.”
Services that Wikimedia operates communicate with each other across many diff erent servers, creating complexity that makes the infrastructure difficult to monitor effectively. Finding a solution that could handle the task was challenging. They also needed to work with a vendor partner that understood and supported Wikimedia’s nonprofit vision, which only exacerbated the challenge.
“It’s important for us to find partners that support our mission and goals,” said Woo. “Because we are a nonprofit, our funds are limited. Even though we are running an enterprise-grade system and require enterprise-grade solutions, we often don’t have the funds to adopt them. As a result, we rely on vendors’ understanding and look for partners that understand our needs, and can work with us to deploy the correct solution.”
Solution Woo’s team discovered Nimsoft WatchMouse, a software-as-a- service (SaaS) solution that makes it easy to proactively monitor Web
applications, websites and cloud service performance from around the globe. Nimsoft enabled Wikimedia to monitor and report on uptime and availability across its array of user-built projects.
Today WatchMouse gathers availability data for Wikimedia across a network of over 60 monitoring points of presence in more than 30 countries and displays the information to its public site at http://
status.wikimedia.org/. This public status page clearly displays the current status of core services and performance and availability history of Wikimedia projects. At any time, users can visit the site to find out if such services as the API, GeoIP Lookup, or images and media are working normally; check performance metrics; and see what percentage of uptime a service has experienced in the past 24 hours. The pages are hosted by Nimsoft in the cloud using Amazon’s S3 and EC2. If there is a problem with any of Wikimedia’s services, WatchMouse alerts Woo’s team via multiple communication channels. These alerts have enabled a more proactive problem resolution approach, helping Wikimedia keep services up and running. Prior to deploying WatchMouse, Woo’s team had to rely on the community to report problems, either directly or in chat rooms. Since the notices were received after the fact, the team’s ability to respond to and resolve issues was slower, resulting in service being down sometimes for hours.
“Historically, we have been using our own deployed monitoring services to alert us of any issues with our services and infrastructure,” said Woo. “With WatchMouse, we now have a more complete solution.”
With Nimsoft WatchMouse, Wikimedia is able to improve performance and uptime using tangible, objective and detailed monitoring data that helps the development team to pinpoint and eliminate bottlenecks and provide a better user experience. Administrators can quickly determine the source of an issue and address it.
Additionally, Wikimedia’s developers can get an accurate picture of the performance that end users experience with a new service or application before they roll it out. Helpful dashboards and reports deliver additional transparency to Wikimedia staff .
“People in our community are very smart; many are coders, developers and engineers,” said Woo. “Being able to see the status of the services reassures them we’re doing all we can to keep them available.”
Results With Nimsoft WatchMouse, Wikimedia’s team has the visibility they need to not just understand, but improve the end user experience. In addition, according to Woo, providing self-service access to
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