redirection.io offers several ways to be notified when things happen on your website or in your project.
We have launched today new "team notifications", to keep your team or coworkers informed of the occurrence of an event in the redirection.io project. For the moment, the notification feature is able to send notifications to Slack channels, email addresses (a mailing-list, for example) or to webhook URLs (for automation).
This feature is available only to "Pro" plans and is designed to keep your colleagues informed that something is happening in the project. This "something" can be an event of different types:
Last week, we have taken part to the #EcoEx21 online-conference - the "Ecosystem Experience" is the yearly grand-meeting of OVHcloud, the european leading hosting company. The online-conference covered many infrastructure topics during 2 days, on november 16th and 17th.
Our CEO, Xavier, shared a talk with Aline Passelègue (Marketing Manager, OVHcloud Marketplace) and Laura Berger (Global Channel Manager, Scaleflex / Cloudimage) to explain how SaaS products help businesses improve their online presence and optimize their ROI using quality tools.
At redirection.io, we are long-time OVHcloud partners and are proud to be part of the close ecosystem of this european tech champion. The infrastructure provided by OVHcloud helps us build a scalable and performant infrastructure, to collect and process hundreds of million lines of logs per day. With several PoP, the technical solutions offered by OVHcloud make a good ground to build on, and allow our customers to benefit of a reliable and performant service.
The question of Web performance
When asked about the notion of "Web performance", Xavier explained that web performance cannot be only measured based on the raw speed or the responsiveness of a Web platform, but that it is indeed made of a collection of many indicators. Does it perform well from a business point of view? Does it work well under all traffic conditions? Do media and linked assets load in a fast way? Does it help improve the brand perception, or on the contrary does it have a negative impact on your image?
How to monitor your growing business?
As a business grows, it can become quite complicated to monitor the scalability of its Web platform. Just like a real "physical" business will require some care, your online shop needs monitoring and preventive actions: does the site still work when there are many customers at the same time? What happens when a product becomes out of stock? How can you make sure that all the pages work, not only your homepage and the main category pages?
It appears that the solution is not only a technical one - the reliability of your online business can not only rest on the shoulders of your tech team, but there is a need to empower non-technical managers and provide them with the right tools to optimize the website from a business point of view.
A great source of information are the website's own traffic logs - analyzing the path of customers will learn you a lot about what to optimize on your web platform. redirection.io is a great way to collect traffic logs in real-time, perform customer analysis, and learn about issues that you wouldn't be aware of instead (and, of course, fix those issues).
Online SaaS tools and ROI
For sure, SaaS solutions and external tools do cost some money. However, you do not necessarily need to see those tools as a cost, but as an investment to improve your web platform. A professionnal website usually requires a dedicated team, ranging from developers, UX designers, marketing managers and customer support. The ROI of using quality tools is almost always immediate, as they allow your team to work in a more efficient and organized way, which will in turn generate more revenue.
The OVHcloud marketplace is a great way to find quality tools, which have been curated and chosen for their quality and high potential. Also, we recommend searching for other customer advices, asking for demos, and choosing performant products. However, keep in mind the "Less is more" principle, and use external solutions with care to avoid clutter your website with unnecessary javascript tags and solutions that would only slow down your website and make the user experience painful.
See you for the OVHcloud EcoEx22
The conclusion of the talk is all about ways to optimize a growing e-shop. There are SaaS solutions out there to monitor your traffic without making it a tech-savvy headache! Your non-tech team can also contribute in concrete ways to the good performance of your web platform.
A big "thank you" to the OVHcloud team for inviting us along with Scaleflex for this talk. Rendez-vous next year for the OVHcloud #EcoEx22!
Many redirection.io users have made our logs trail a central part of their strategy to discover traffic issues, and ultimately ensure that their website is running smoothly. Some of them even explained us that they keep a sticky browser tab with redirection.io opened, to regularly check "how things go well".
But in the meantime, some other redirection.io users were missing a long-asked feature, a regular reminder that would ping them if something was going wrong. While redirection.io is a great solution to monitor the traffic of your website and ensure that it runs well without issues, not everyone has the reflex to check the logs on a daily basis. As they say: what works too well tends to be forgotten!
This is the reason why we are launching today a new weekly digest email, available to all our customers right now 🎉 It features all the important information about your project, and all the events that occurred the week before:
how did the traffic evolve? 📈
did new errors happen, that should need some attention (and maybe new redirect rules)? 🔃
are your redirection.io agent instances healthy, or do they need upgrades? ⏩
For more readability and efficiency, the weekly digest email embeds some charts so you can notice issues in a matter of seconds:
To enable this new weekly digest, head to your profile preferences. There, you can subscribe to receive this weekly email for all or some of your projects. Of course, if you manage dozen of projects, you may not want to receive as many emails as you have projects, so pick only the most important ones!
Once done, simply wait for next Monday morning, and you'll get some news of your website 🙂
With time fleeing, some redirection.io company organizations have been growing and have become so large that it can be a bit hard to figure out who performed actions in the organization projects.
In the meantime, we have been adding several features: new rule actions, introduced at the beginning of 2021, new publication roles and a redesign of the invitation features, our public API (currently in private beta), the redirection.io website crawler, etc., and it can become a bit cumbersome, in large organizations, to get a full overview of who is performing actions.
This is why we are introducing a new audit trail feature, in order to help organization administrators understand and audit which users are actively using the redirection.io solution within their organization.
This audit trail is available for every redirection.io organizations, whatever the plan - we always considered security is a first-class citizen, and strive to provide all our users with tools that can help them ensure security and traceability within their web platform. Security should not be a paid option.
The audit trail for your organization can be read by org administrators under the organization settings. We have begun logging events at the beginning of October 2021, so you will not find any event prior to that date.
We have rolled out today a new feature for all redirection.io customers: marker templates.
Markers are the way in redirection.io to define URL patterns, which are useful to create wildcard redirection rules that will apply to several URLs at once.
For example, defining a Trigger with /shop/<REFERENCE>.html as the Source URL will match all the requests to a URL of this form: /shop/ref-a12.html, /shop/ref-12-34-56.html, etc.
In large redirection plans, it can be a little bit repetitive to define the same marker in several rules. The rules import tool already allows to create markers dynamically for many rules at once, but it does not help to update existing rules.
This is the reason why we have decided to introduce the concept of marker templates. In a few words, you can now define, at the project level, a set of markers that can be easily reused in several rules of the project. When a marker template is updated, you can update the rules which use this template: maintaining project-wide patterns is easier and more flexible than before!
Using a project-wide marker template when creating a new redirection rule saves you a few clicks, for more productive and easy rules management:
There are releases around the corner today! We have just published the 2.2.0 releases for the redirection.io agent, the Apache and nginx modules. These releases introduce several new features, that should be of great use for system administrators.
agent improvements
The agent now supports two command line options:
--version displays the version of the agent,
--test can be used to test the configuration file and display possible errors before reloading the agent.
Also, we have added a metrics HTTP endpoint in the agent, which can be enabled in the agent configuration, and used in your monitoring tools to collect some data about the behavior of the agent.
nginx and Apache module changes
Some new features have also been added in the 2.2.0 versions of the nginx and Apache modules. First, it is now possible to configure how the connection pool is managed between the webserver and the redirection.io agent. See the documentation about these options, for both nginx and Apache.
We have also introduced a new redirectionio_set_header / RedirectionioSetHeader virtualhost directive, which allows to map some Apache or nginx variables as request headers when the request is inspected by the redirection.io agent. This may sound a bit obscure, but it opens up many possibilities for redirection.io automation. For example, it means that you can now create rules which can be triggered based on variables created by other server modules - we will tell you more about use cases in a few days.
A few weeks ago, we have enabled two-factor authentication for all redirection.io customer accounts. While this feature has been fairly successful, we have found that helping to improve the security of user accounts was not enough. Some redirection.io customers have organization with dozens of users, and one single compromised account or password could result in the leakage of company sensitive data - traffic statistics, configured rules, etc.
So starting today, we're giving organization administrators a way to strengthen access to their organization's projects, by making a new security setting available. Organization administrators can now require all organization users to enable Two-factor authentication on their personal accounts.
A picture is worth a thousand words, so here is what it looks like:
In the 1.6.0 release of the agent, we have introduced the test mode, a new way to help you test and try your redirect rules before they are published to your production servers. Historicaly, it was not possible to log the traffic from instances configured with this "test mode", which was meant for pre-production or testing servers - we estimated that it did not make much sense to log traffic from these platforms.
However, due to several requests on this topic, we have changed the behavior in the recent 2.1.0 release of the agent, and we have made it possible to enable HTTP traffic logging from instances using the "test mode". From now on, you can get a view of your live HTTP traffic logs even on "test" instances.
Another much-demanded feature about instances was the ability to configure their behavior directly within the agent.yml configuration file. We have introduced, also in the 2.1.0 release of the agent, the new test_mode and logging configuration, which can be used to statically set the configuration of agents server-side. If those keys are defined, you will not be able anymore to change this setting in the instances management interface:
We are announcing today two great improvements for your account and website security.
As of now, we support authenticating to redirection.io using a Google or a Microsoft account. If you used to login using your email and password, you can now safely login with Google or Microsoft, too. If logging in with an existing email address, you will continue to see your organizations and projets, like before.
For users who prefer to login using an email and a password, we have added the possibility to setup Two-factor authentication. We urge our customers to enable it and raise the level of protection of their redirection.io accounts.
Following the incident that affected our production infrastructure on March 10th, we have recently launched a new public status page to inform our customers of the current status of our platform and be able to clearly communicate when the service is down or disrupted.
The status page informs about several components of our infrastructure: our public website, the rules management interface, our APIs and endpoints, etc. You can find this page at https://redirectionio.statuspage.io/
In the mean time, we continue to perform the improvement actions listed in the post mortem of our last outage. We are also adding some exciting new features that should be coming soon... Stay tuned!
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For example, defining a Trigger with 
Using a project-wide marker template when creating a new redirection rule saves you a few clicks, for more productive and easy rules management:
Want to lean more ? 
