1. A Few Thoughts about APM (Application Performance Management) and Its Future
Application Performance Management is one of those IT buzzwords that encompasses many products and services. Gartner has broken it down to five segments: End-user experience monitoring (a.k.a. RUM – Real-User Monitoring), Application runtime architecture discovery, modeling and display, User-defined transaction profiling (a.k.a. BTM – Business Transaction Monitoring/Management), Component deep-dive monitoring, and Application performance analytics. This post gives some insight into what APM means, and where it’s headed.

2. Using the Python SDK for Monitis Custom Monitors
This post introduces sandbox.monitis.com, a new development community that makes it easy to install custom monitors in Monitis. This post guides you through creating a sandbox account and installing a Python monitor which uses the Netstat command to extract system health information. Sample code is provided as well as snapshots of the tables from the web based dashboard.
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1. Integrate NGINX Monitoring into Monitis.com
NGINX is one of the most popular new web servers out there. It is lightweight and powerful. But monitoring it is no small task. The statistics module that comes with NGINX is not reader friendly, so this post shows you how to monitor NGINX performance with Monitis. In 5 quick and easy steps, Monitis creates a monitor for your NGINX server, with a column for each performance metric. Graphs are shown.
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1. Top 10 Open Source eCommerce Software (Joomla and Drupal) – Part 1/2
This is for all you eCommerce store owners. Previous posts compared 20 shopping cart software vendors, including Shopify and Volusion. This post is similar, but focuses on open source shopping cart softwares for Drupal and Joomla. The first post covers the following 5 products/vendors: Hikashop, SimpleCaddy, OpenCart, redShop and RokQuickCart. Each is described with a list of Pros and Cons.
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1. Performance Tuning Windows Server 2008 R2 Hyper-V: Hardware Selection
This is a followup to a previous article that got substantial reads, Performance Tuning Windows Server 2008 R2 Hyper-V: Hardware Selection. Several future posts will delve deeper into this topic. This post walks you through selecting the optimal hardware on which to run Hyper-V. Recommendations are given for selecting the right processor, memory, network adapter, storage, and installation process. If you’re interested in running Windows 2008 in a virtual environment, these tips can save you a lot of headaches.
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1. Monitis-Top Command Line Tool in C#
A previous post introduced Monitis Top, a quick and easy tool to query your Monitis monitors from the command line. The original code was written in VBScript and we had promised a C# version. Here is that new version along with explanations of the class hierarchy and methods.
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