RapidSpike Year Rundown
2018 has been an amazing year for RapidSpike, we have been super busy helping people deliver awesome website performance and we’ve built some amazing new features. Here’s this year’s rundown on our brilliant digital experience monitoring platform:
January
We started 2018 with a blast by releasing our Vulnerability Scanning tool. Checking for vulnerabilities is vital to ensure malicious attacks don’t exploit poor configuration, out of date patching, cross-site scripting or injection vulnerabilities of your website or web application.
February
We love customer requests for new features because listening to our customers is important for our future direction, so we try to prioritise working on them as much as possible. In the first few months of 2018 we added a number of customer requests including alerts based on response times, improved TV mode, dashboard performance improvements and much more.
March
WordPress websites make up 30% of the internet – which means that the platform is a prime target for hackers. As part of our Vulnerability Scanning service, we now test over 10,000 known WordPress vulnerabilities. Just set up a scan and we’ll automatically test the version of WordPress installed, the theme in use and all plugins … plugged-in. Check out our blog for more info.
April
Not everything is as simple as ping. We know a lot of our users have important pages tucked behind access authentication. We decided to make your lives a little easier – and so now you can pass a username and password to our page monitors and log in to your pages with basic authentication and check content to truly ensure that 200 response is the real deal.
May
We know the importance of always being in the loop, especially when it comes to monitoring. In May we integrated with Pushover to complement our other messaging tools like PagerDuty, ServiceNow, Slack
June
Halfway through 2018, we appointed Gav Winter the role of CEO at RapidSpike. Gav has valuable insights into tech start-ups, founding The Test People and creating Ten10. Gav reflects the progress Rapidspike are making as we continue to focus on expanding opportunities in both retail and digital sectors. Discover more about Gav on our blog.
July
We’re always seeking ways to improve the app interface and make things easier to use. This year has been no exception, with tons of great usability tweaks all across the platform. In July we released a massive update to our navigation, dashboards
August
In August we supercharged our API Monitoring tools with a whole suite of new options. Web APIs are rapidly becoming the backbone of most internet providing apps, modern websites and integrating systems. The new upgrades included: New HTTP verbs; PUT and DELETE, Custom Headers and Basic Authentication.
September
We released our Executive Insights Reports, designed to bring a new understanding to your monitoring data. It combines a ton of useful metrics, compares to the previous week and also to a global baseline of performance. A great deliverable for dev-ops teams, management meetings and other stakeholders. Plus it’s super pretty.
October
This month we added tons of functionality to our Intelligent Page Monitors. You can now choose what browser to use (Chrome or Firefox), and you can compare two IPMs side-by-side to help with debugging. See the blog post.
Presenting… the RapidSpike Score! We can now give you insight into where you rank according to your data, other RapidSpike customers, our team’s knowledge and general standard practices in terms of real user experience, page construction, speed, efficiency, uptime and more. Find out more about RapidSpike Scoring on the Knowledge Base.
October was also Cyber Security Month, on the RapidSpike Twitter page we posted our tips and tricks on how to improve security. Our contribution to Cyber Security Month resulted in being named a National Cyber Security Alliance Month Champion!
November
November was one of our busiest ever months. We launched our new “eco” theme. We love the simplicity of nature which mirrors our forward-thinking attitude toward digital experience monitoring.
The launch of the RapidSpike Data Breach Monitor (DBM) is a giant step in security monitoring. The monitor can reduce the average detection time for a data breach from 12 days to under 5 minutes! We tested it against recent major hacks (British Airways, Vision Direct etc.) and we detected ALL of them. Find out more about Data Breach Monitoring on our blog post.
Another fantastic insight feature added in November was Google Lighthouse – providing a set of metrics to help guide you in building a better website with a full application-like experience for your users and ultimately will give you a more effective SEO spend. For more information visit our blog post.
December
As we wind down for the year we have been looking at how we can continue improving digital experience. 2019 is set to be an important year in cybersecurity, with ZD Net predicting website skimming as one of the most impactful security trends.
We’re dedicated to improving website performance, security, and availability and we have a host of exciting things coming up in the new year. This includes being shortlisted for KPMG’s 2019 Best British Tech Startup!
As our Christmas present to you, we present…Detecting Data Breaches Fast Ad featuring Thor the office dog!
So what about 2019?
2019 is going to be big! January starts for us with KPMGs Best British Startup competition, where we have reached the semi-finals!
We’ll be updating the app with new onboarding, plus some great improvements to our navigation and overall appearance.
The Data Breach monitor will be upgraded to reduce detection times from 5 minutes to around 1 minute.
Then we’ll be releasing our big feature: the “Insights” engine (RapidAI) – which will elevate all our monitoring to a completely new level. Insights gives you a simple and effective way of pinpointing issues and improvements across your platform. Lots more on this soon!
Later in the first
We hope you had a fantastic 2018, and we hope, if you haven’t already, you’ll join us on our journey!
Merry Christmas and a very Happy New Year from everyone at RapidSpike.
