New: Performance graphs (beta) 8 Dec 09

We quietly rolled out a new feature into the Brightbox control panel a couple of weeks ago, adding performance graphs for each of your Brightbox virtual machines. To view graphs for a virtual machine, click the “full details” link from the overview screen. You can currently choose to view CPU, disk i/o, public and private network usage for the last hour, day, week and month.

The graphing service is currently in beta, so you might find some occasional gaps in data for the time being, but over time this should prove a very useful feature.

New: reboots and additional VM info in control panel 1 Jul 09

A few days ago we deployed some improvements to our control panel, enabling tighter integration with our backend infrastructure. For the technically minded (or remotely interested) we’re using the magic of AMQP/RabbitMQ to enable this integration and we’ll be using this system to do more over the coming months.

The first fruits of this integration include the ability to initiate a reboot of any of your Brightbox virtual machines and enable you to view more information on the underlying physical host server and storage device.

You can now reboot any of your virtual machines via the control panel by simply clicking the “reboot” link and specifying either a “soft” or “hard” reboot. A soft reboot is the equivalent of running the shutdown -r command within the OS, whereas a hard reboot is equivalent to cutting power. In most cases, if you want to reboot your virtual machine you’ll want to try the soft option first to avoid the risk of filesystem corruption.

The additional virtual machine information is available by clicking the “full details” link next to one of your products. You’ll now see an additional two rows of information, “Host server” and “Storage”, which will now enable customers to make more sense of our status messages when, for example, we need to do some planned maintenance on a particular host server.

We’re constantly working on improving our control panel and we hope these two items are useful to customers, more improvements to follow soon :)

New features: Extra disk space, IP addresses & Multiple email contacts 30 Jan 09

Today we pushed a couple more updates to the control panel. Now, rather than creating a ticket, you can order more disk space and additional IP addresses for any of your boxes directly from the control panel. Additional disk space can be purchased for just £5 per 10GB block and IP addresses for £2.50/month (with one-off setup of £30).

We’ve also added the ability for separate billing and technical email contacts to your account in addition to the regular account holder email address (this is a stop-gap addition until we implement multiple users per account which is on our development roadmap :)

Here’s a summary of notifications and recipients:

• Order confirmation: account holder, billing contact & technical contact
• Successful or Failed payment: account holder & billing contact
• Credit card expiry notice: account holder & billing contact
• New virtual machine deployed: account holder & technical contact
• New Helpdesk request: account holder & technical contact
• Password reset: account holder
• MySQL slow query alerts: account holder & technical contact

Keep watching over the next few weeks as we announce more improvements, including remote reboots…

New feature: Label your Brightboxes 14 Jan 09

We’ll be releasing lots of cool features for our control panel over the next couple of months. The latest of these features is a small addition but something that customers will hopefully find useful, especially those with several Brightboxes.

You can now add your own simple labels to each of your boxes so you can quickly remember which box is which. Previously, you only really had the box hostname e.g myapp-001.vm.brightbox.net as a reference, but you can now also add your own label e.g “Bob’s staging server”.

New feature: MySQL slow query log 10 Dec 08

As mentioned in my previous post, we’ve got several exciting features for the Brightbox control panel in the pipeline. The latest of these, which we’re releasing today, is the MySQL slow query log. This feature will assist customers in optimising their databases by displaying details of slow queries executed by their MySQL user on our shared cluster.

If the nightly log parser find any slow queries for your user, the data will be added to your list and an alert will be displayed when you login to the control panel.

Clicking the alert, will take you to the main MySQL service page where you will see a list of unacknowledged queries.

Of course, this feature will simply let you know you have a slow query that you should investigate and optimise. How to optimise your database queries is beyond the scope of this blog post :)

New: order upgrades via Control Panel 29 Oct 08

This is something we’ve been promising for a while now, but thanks to some sterling work from Rahoul and Caius, I’m pleased to say that you can now very easily upgrade any of your Brightbox virtual machines via the Control Panel. Simply login, click the “upgrade” link alongside the relevant virtual machine and choose the size of box you wish to upgrade to.

Also, we’ve recently deployed additional server capacity, meaning our lead times for both upgrades and new boxes are now down to original levels.