A heavy book!

What would you rather carry on your back — textbooks or lighter than air apps and data?

When I went to school (six miles each way in the snow and rain, LOL), every year the books got heavier. Now, students can look forward to easy trips home with courses online — brought to them by the cloud. I recently read a commentary that said textbooks met the needs of 19th and 2oth century students, but that they fall short of the needs of today’s interactive students. “They are old-school delivery that supports old-school pedagogy,” the author stated. ” (OK, I must admit, I had to go to Wikipedia to find out what “pedagogy” means.)

Instead, cloud computing is much more appropriate for both students and faculty and staff.  The more schools that adopt the cloud, the more they can replace books — which by the way, have a tendency to get rather stale and outdated fast and cost a lot to replace — with cloud-based content delivery.

We at Monitis have been working with more more schools to help them ensure reliability of content-as-a-service.  But they are going beyond course content. The cloud is settling into ivy-covered walls with such resources as word processors, spreadsheets, databases, data visualization and analysis applications, teacher and administrator tools, and voice/video communications.  Often, much of that is provided online by the likes of Google and Amazon and Rackspace, and that’s why we are seeing big demand from schools for cloud platform monitoring, too.

When I think of all the schools I’ve worked with that are trimming IT budgets and making way for future scalability, boosting services to students, ensuring updated and current course content and making administration more efficient, I am impressed by their faith in the cloud movement. Faith is one thing, but I think that they are also good business moves, and the drivers within institutions–whether they be educators, IT folks or students themselves — are far-sighted and good decision makers.

Everybody wants to improve education and our educational system, but sometimes it takes a little thinking out of the box to make forward strides.

Monitis has added yet another video tutorial, this time showing how users can monitor their cloud instances on Amazon AWS, Rackspace, and GoGrid in just a few minutes. To view this and other tutorials or request a live demo, check our Demo page, and subscribe to our Youtube channel.

Previous videos showed how to set up internal monitoring on a physical server using the Monitis Smart Agent. Once installed, the agent collects and sends performance data to Monitis. The agent works on cloud instances too, but you’ll have to install an agent on each new instance. Cloud monitoring automates this process, so you can start monitoring your entire cloud with the click of a button.

The video shows how to configure an account with Amazon EC2. Go to Add Monitor>Cloud Monitor and select Amazon EC2. Enter an Account Name of your choosing, your Amazon AWS Account Number, Account Key, and Secret Key, all provided by Amazon when signing up. Next select the Amazon region you’ve signed up for. You’ll be prompted to upload your Amazon EC2 private key. Monitis will now authenticate you into your Amazon account. You can set monitoring and notification rules to specify what gets monitored on your servers and when alerts should be sent. Monitis can monitor your cloud instances both internally via agent for CPU, Processes, etc., and externally via SSH, HTTP, or Ping. Your Amazon instances will appear on your dashboard along with their performance statistics.

San Jose, CA – August 31, 2010 – Monitis, the leading provider of 100% Cloud-based network and systems monitoring solutions, today announced the deployment of another monitoring node, this time in Singapore. The new node will be managed by Singapore-based En Technologies (www.en.com.sg). Along with a new node in Spain, this brings to 12 the number of Monitis monitoring nodes available worldwide. This is in addition to Monitis’ exclusive ability to offer IT managers nodes from custom locations of their choosing.

What makes Monitis’ nodes so unique is their True One-Minute Monitoring. This means that each of Monitis’ 12 nodes is monitoring a client’s site every minute. This is not the case with most other companies that claim to offer one-minute monitoring. Such companies only monitor once a minute from one individual location – not from all of their nodes. If a monitoring service is offering 100 nodes, each node is typically only activated once every 100 minutes – a far from optimal situation.

Hovhannes Ayovan, Monitis’ Founder and CEO, commented, “As the hub of business in Southeast Asia, Singapore is a critical location for us to offer a monitoring node. Now, for IT managers in the region, the only thing they need to worry about is how hot the black pepper crab is on Joo Chiat Road, and not whether or not they are getting accurate information about their systems.”

About Monitis All-in-One Monitoring Platform

Monitis is the only service that provides Systems Monitoring from the Cloud.  It is leading a new era of systems management tools – the Cloud generation.  Monitis is a 100% Cloud-based, complete, and flexible IT monitoring solution, offered on a Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) model.

Monitis consolidates back-end monitoring, application monitoring, website monitoring, and cloud monitoring in an all-in-one, hosted monitoring service. The platform is easily customizable and may be used for managing of all kinds of IT assets such as websites, servers, routers, switches, VoIP devices, DNS, databases, processes and any other IP devices.  Monitis provides users with a comprehensive view of their system’s health and performance.

About Monitis

Monitis believes that the Cloud is the biggest thing to happen in IT management since IT management. Having seen this vision early, Monitis is now the global leader in developing this market.  It is the first affordable network and systems monitoring solution based 100% in the Cloud.

Besides Monitis’ enthusiastic and loyal user base of 50,000 customers from small businesses to Fortune 500 companies to government agencies and educational institutions, Monitis has won rave reviews from the technology analyst community. These accolades include:

• Being named as the “Most Innovative Start-Up for 2009″ by industry analyst The 451 Group at their annual client conference in December 2009.
  
• Being ranked among the 2010 OnDemand 100 in April 2010. The OnDemand 100 is a ranking by Morgan Stanley, KPMG, and AlwaysOn of the world’s top 100 private companies.
  

Headquartered in San Jose, CA, Monitis is lead by a team of IT professionals with deep experience running enterprise-grade IT businesses, as well as starting and selling several IT start-ups.  Using a global workforce, particularly its R&D team based in Yerevan, Armenia, Monitis is poised to move from strength to strength.  At present, it has a loyal and enthusiastic user community of 50,000, and an average month-on-month growth of over 10%.

Contact:
Monitis Inc.
Sales & Marketing Department
info@monitis.com
http://www.monitis.com
US & Canada Toll Free: +1-800-657-7949
UK + International: +44-845-527-3346
France + International: +33-48-607-9035
2880 Zanker Road Suite 203
San Jose, CA-95134
USA

We received some great feedback about video tutorials for External, Internal, Transaction, and Full Page Monitoring, so we’ve decided to make more tutorials. This week we’ve added one for network monitoring.

For starters, you can easily Ping an IP address behind your firewall from a server on which you’ve installed our agent. Simply go to Add Monitor>Internal, check Ping, and enter the IP Address. You can set thresholds for # of Lost Packets and Packet size and set alerts to be notified by email, SMS, Phone call, or IM if these thresholds are reached.

SNMP, short for Simple Network Monitoring Protocol, is the most common protocol for checking network-attached devices, such as routers and switches, for conditions that warrant administrative attention. Once you have the Monitis Agent installed on one of your servers, you can configure SNMP on our web-based dashboard by going to Add Monitor>Internal, checking SNMP, entering the Host IP and the Object Identifier. Every network device comes with Object Identifiers that let you monitor certain characteristics of the device. You can also set up an SNMP Trap, which, instead of polling the device periodically, sends an urgent message to Monitis when a specific problem occurs. Watch as we set one of each of these monitors up in the video, and feel free to try yourself by signup up for our 15 day trial.

Not Raking in the Dough

I read where UBS, the Swiss banking giant, found that Amazon Web Services (AWS) earns $500 million yearly from its cloud computing business.

While that number may sound impressive to some at first blush, it’s really only around 2% of Amazon.com’s annual revenues. And in the blog I read about this news, that would be less than AWS makes on “garden rakes.”

UBS got its numbers by breaking out a lump sum of Amazon’s quarterly earnings reports that it calls “other” revenue, separate from its retail revenues. “Other” includes Amazon EC2, Amazon S3 and other services like packing and shipping goods. On the bright side, UBS predicts that AWS cloud revenue might grow to $2.54 billion by 2014.

So what do these numbers mean to you? On the one hand, $500 million is a tiny fraction of worldwide IT spending — which comes to $365 billion a year right now — so it’s painfully obvious that public cloud computing is a lot smaller market than it’s been made out to be. However, on the other hand, we know that private clouds are preferred right now, as enterprises still have the heeby-geebies about security on public platforms.

So, my take on this is that just because AWS isn’t raking in (forgive the pun) billions of dollars yearly on the cloud right now, it doesn’t mean it won’t someday. After all, it’s built the infrastructure. And you know about that saying: “If you build it they will come.”

The Indian cloud market is now worth about $110 million annually, but a new survey says that could grow by almost 10 times as much to over $1 billion by 2013. Wow; that’s a lot of cloud cash!

The study, called Cloud Computing in India: Opportunities & Way Forward, by Zinnov Management Consulting, says that the Indian cloud computing market, SaaS has seen the most rapid growth until now, and is likely to reach $650 million in sales by 2015, while PaaS and IaaS markets together will reach $434 million each by then.

“This is indeed a perfect storm,” said Pari Natarajan, Chief Executive Officer, Zinnov Management Consulting, in an article I read in The Times of India. “The only difference is that, this storm is destructive only to companies who are not willing to change, while it is a huge opportunity for others.”

Collaborative Applications, CRM, ERP & Email workloads are the dominant apps in Indian cloud computing, according to the article.

I’ve always thought that the emerging economies of the world are the future goldmines of cloud computing, especially as opportunities for further growth in mature markets like the U.S. and Europe scale down a bit. And I believe that someday, homegrown companies in India will provide real competition to today’s mostly Western cloud services providers. Hear that Google?

I know that in my business, as Monitis grows globally and establishes new monitoring stations around the world, our international customer list expands accordingly. I guess my point here is that we in the IT industry often get caught up in our very Western-centric thinking about the cloud, that it’s mostly a trend in developed countries. But nothing could be further from the truth. The cloud, by its very nature, is borderless, and businesses and customers can be found everywhere — in Bombay, Beijing, Berlin and Boston.

San Jose, CA – August 23, 2010 – Monitis, the leading provider of 100% Cloud-based network and systems monitoring solutions, today announced the deployment of another monitoring node, this time in Spain. The new node will be managed by the Spanish service provider CSR-Online. Along with a new node in Singapore, this brings to 12 the number of Monitis monitoring nodes available worldwide. This is in addition to Monitis’ exclusive ability to offer IT managers nodes from custom locations of their choosing.

What makes Monitis’ nodes so unique is their True One-Minute Monitoring. This means that each of Monitis’ 12 nodes is monitoring a client’s site every minute. This is not the case with most other companies that claim to offer one-minute monitoring. Such companies only monitor once a minute from one individual location – not from all of their nodes. If a monitoring service is offering 100 nodes, each node is typically only activated once every 100 minutes – a far from optimal situation.

Hovhannes Ayovan, Monitis’ Founder and CEO, commented, “We didn’t choose Spain as our newest node location because they won the World Cup and have great wines (although both ideas eased the decision). We chose Spain because it is an integral part of our expansion strategy in Europe. Spanish IT managers deserve to be liberated from the outdated software-based monitoring solutions and Monitis is here to show them the way.”

About Monitis All-in-One Monitoring Platform

Monitis is the only service that provides Systems Monitoring from the Cloud.  It is leading a new era of systems management tools – the Cloud generation.  Monitis is a 100% Cloud-based, complete, and flexible IT monitoring solution, offered on a Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) model.

Monitis consolidates back-end monitoring, application monitoring, website monitoring, and cloud monitoring in an all-in-one, hosted monitoring service. The platform is easily customizable and may be used for managing of all kinds of IT assets such as websites, servers, routers, switches, VoIP devices, DNS, databases, processes and any other IP devices.  Monitis provides users with a comprehensive view of their system’s health and performance. 

About Monitis

Monitis believes that the Cloud is the biggest thing to happen in IT management since IT management. Having seen this vision early, Monitis is now the global leader in developing this market.  It is the first affordable network and systems monitoring solution based 100% in the Cloud. 

Besides Monitis’ enthusiastic and loyal user base of 50,000 customers from small businesses to Fortune 500 companies to government agencies and educational institutions, Monitis has won rave reviews from the technology analyst community. These accolades include:

• Being named as the “Most Innovative Start-Up for 2009″ by industry analyst The 451 Group at their annual client conference in December 2009.
  
• Being ranked among the 2010 OnDemand 100 in April 2010. The OnDemand 100 is a ranking by Morgan Stanley, KPMG, and AlwaysOn of the world’s top 100 private companies.
  

Headquartered in San Jose, CA, Monitis is lead by a team of IT professionals with deep experience running enterprise-grade IT businesses, as well as starting and selling several IT start-ups.  Using a global workforce, particularly its R&D team based in Yerevan, Armenia, Monitis is poised to move from strength to strength.  At present, it has a loyal and enthusiastic user community of 50,000, and an average month-on-month growth of over 10%.

Contact:
Monitis Inc.
Sales & Marketing Department
info@monitis.com
http://www.monitis.com
US & Canada Toll Free: +1-800-657-7949
UK + International: +44-845-527-3346
France + International: +33-48-607-9035
2880 Zanker Road Suite 203
San Jose, CA-95134
USA

Investors who went to Microsoft’s annual meeting came away with positive view of the company’s efforts to develop and grow the cloud, according to an article I recently read.

In the piece, some analysts said that investors had been pulling their money out of Microsoft over concerns that the company wasn’t doing enough to develop new sources of potential revenue. But in the same piece, the analysts noted that Microsoft has a history of adapting technologies invented by others and spreading them to the mass market — and that’s good news.

Microsoft’s COO Kevin Turner, at the company’s annual investor meeting in late July, predicted that it would “lead” with the cloud, and cited examples of winning cloud contracts against Google and IBM. That got investment analysts in a positive mood for Microsoft. For example, a Deutsche Bank analyst said that the bank believes the cloud is evolving from a threat to an opportunity for Microsoft.  And some said they believed investors’ hesitancy over Microsoft was probably due to their lack of knowledge about Azure — which encompasses cloud computing and data storage.

Glad to see Microsoft is getting more confidence from investors. I can only hope that more businesses get more confidence, too, that is, in the cloud. Having monitoring services that check servers and networks and cloud platforms certainly helps remove some of the insecurity.

VMWare's Big Event to Teach about the Cloud via Virtualization

I read recently that at VMworld 2010, the largest virtualization event in the industry, which spotlights VMWare and is set to take place in San Francisco in August and Copenhagen in October, VMWare will put its technology to good, practical use for all its VMworld labs, according to a press release.

At VMworld, attendees can deep-dive into technical sessions and get hands-on labs training, plus access to a wealth of technology and cloud partners who come to the show.  For example, attendees can share and gain practical knowledge around virtualization best practices, building a private cloud, leveraging the public cloud, managing desktops as a service, virtualizing enterprise applications and other strategies.

This year all VMworld labs will be powered by the VMware LabCloud portal, a self-service interface that was custom-built to enable attendees to access lab courses and content. The technology allows VMware to increase the number of labs it offers and provides attendees more ways to explore how virtualization can make their organization more efficient. VMworld plans to stage more than 22,000 lab seats through 480 simultaneous user workstations during the four-day event in San Francisco.

I’m hoping to attend the conference myself, since Monitis has an office in San Francisco, and I’m especially intrigued and pleased by the theme of VMworld 2010:  “Virtual Roads. Actual Clouds.” It will hopefully make it a lot clearer to organizations how to migrate to cloud computing through virtualization and how to explore new pathways for discovering, learning and breaking new ground in transforming IT.

And of course, I’ll be evangelizing about the importance of monitoring servers and networks – virtualized and non-virtualized. So, if you see me, stop me and I’ll bend your ear a bit.

The third of our new video tutorials shows how to set up internal monitoring. With other products this is usually a time-consuming process, sometimes taking weeks. Servers usually need a VPN connection to your monitoring server. This can be a pain to set up, especially with remote servers, and particularly with open source systems like Nagios and Zenoss. You also need a database to store historical data and a reporting module. Monitis cuts setup time to 5 minutes by utilizing every shortcut enabled by cloud computing. Instead of reporting to your server, the Monitis internal agent sends encrypted data to the Monitis Cloud via https where it is stored on world class servers. Let’s walk through the steps outlined in the video to set up internal monitoring for 10 servers. We’ll time it. First we log into Monitis, click Add Monitor to load the internal monitoring wizard, and download the proper agent for our operating system. (30 seconds so far)

We are running Linux, so we can automatically install the agent on all ten machines. It takes about 3 minutes. If you’re running Windows, it takes 1 minute to install and activate (with your login) on each server. Here’s a Windows agent that’s been activated.

Firewalls don’t need to be touched since the agent only uses port 443. The same setup.zip file can be used to install the agent on multiple servers, so you only need to download once. Also, you’ll never need to upgrade agents because upgrades are done automatically without manual intervention. Next we go back to the internal monitoring wizard. A list of names assigned to your agents will load. You can assign a tag-name to group internal monitors together. This comes in handy when generating reports. We can multi-select all ten agents and select the metrics to monitor (CPU utilization, memory, drive, http, ping), and click Add. (45 seconds) Dozens of movable, re-sizable graphs appear on the dashboard. Soon they are populated with data.

It took just 4 minutes and 15 seconds to set this up. The time-saving features can be narrowed down to three main points.
1. Agents report to Monitis via https, no need to touch your firewall. Just install and you’re ready to go.
2. Upgrades are done automatically without your intervention. No more concern about patches or versions.
3. Internal Monitoring Wizard lets you configure through any browser, and bulk-configuration of agents is quick and easy.

This video focused on server monitoring. We have another video coming that focuses on network monitoring with SNMP, so stay tuned.