Perfometer Monget  is available now for Monitis users. It presents live website response speed within personal iGoogle pages. Check our Monitoring Widgets (Mongets) for details. You can add it to your personal page right here.

Due to requests of many of our users Monitis Team is happy to introduce Monitis Smart Agent for 64-bit Linux systems. You can download 64-bit agent using the same popup as before, but now you will see there two options as it is shown below:

So you can choose between Linux(32bit) and Linux(64bit) which depends on the operating system you use.

Monitis released series of widgets (we call them mongets) for personal Google or iGoogle. Our users can install them within their Google pages conveniently building tailored performance management desktops. You can find more information in our press release Build Your Performance Management Desktop with Mongets and installations instructions in our Monitis Widgets (Mongets) Page.

Today Monitis Team introduced an exporting feature. It is currently available only for test results, but we’re planning to add this feature to other modules(report, agent, visitor tracking) also by the end of the week. Exporting allows to get the test results in a pdf or csv forms, so you can use this results for your own reports or to present them to your Internet Service Providers in case of any problem. To get this generated files you should simply go to the edit mode of your specified test, select either pdf or csv and click on the “Export” button(see the left part of the snapshot below).

After that the corresponding file will be generated for you(see the right part of the snapshot above).

As Monitis introduced a new check type – Advanced DNS, in this article I would like to provide a brief description of DNS and how it works in general. On the internet DNS(Domain Name System) associates various sorts of information with domain names and translates human-readable computer hostnames into the IP addresses that networking equipment needs for delivering information. The most basic use of DNS is to translate hostnames to IP addresses.

The domain name space consists of a tree of domain names. Each node or leaf in the tree has one or more resource records, which hold information associated with the domain name. The tree sub-divides into zones, which consists of a collection of connected nodes authoritatively served by an authoritative DNS nameserver, the one that publishes information about that domain and the name servers of any domains “beneath” it. A resolver looks up the information associated with nodes and knows how to communicate with name servers by sending DNS requests, and heeding DNS responses. Resolving usually entails iterating through several name servers to find the needed information.

Users generally do not communicate directly with a DNS resolver, instead DNS-resolution takes place transparently in client-applications such as web-browsers, mail-clients, and other Internet applications.

You can refer to the following link http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Domain_name_system in case you would like to go in more details with DNS mechanism.

Monitis Team continues to increase the list of supported check types and now introducing MySQL and Advanced DNS checks. Let’s start with MySQL check. After inputting all necessary info, i.e. username, password, port number, IP of the server MySQL resides on, our monitoring agent will start to check periodically the availability of MySQL DB and you will get a notification in case your DB is unavailable, which is very crucial for every application. Next check type is Advanced DNS, which provides an opportunity to find out if particular Name Server resolves your hostname to a proper IP address or vice-versa. Beside that you can also find out if the Name Server you specified is Authoritative for the hostname you provided. If some of you are unfamiliar with DNS, you will find a detailed description in our Articles section by the end of this week.

Go to the Saved Modules and click on the Contacts menu item, if it is not already opened on your dashboard. After that click on pen icon, which is located in the header part of the Contacts module as it is shown in the following snapshot

Choose SMS option in the combo box of the available notification types. You will see First Name, Last Name and Mobile Phone fields, which should be filled, especially it is very important to enter a valid number in the Mobile Phone field. Please click on the help icon on the right side of that field to see an example and instructions regarding the necessary format for mobile number. After filling the above mentioned fields click on the Add button. If the phone number was entered correctly you will receive an SMS message with activation code. Also a new row will be added in the contacts table, which will be highlighted with red color, to show that contact is not confirmed yet. To confirm the contact you should click on that row, enter an activation number provided in SMS into the corresponding field and click on the Apply button (see below).

If everything is correct after refreshing the page you will see that the above mentioned row is not highlighted anymore. This means that your SMS notifications are enabled and you’re done with SMS activation. After that you can deactivate/activate SMS notifications anytime by simply checking and uncheking checkbox in the Active column.

Good news for blog and website owners, managers, web marketer and webmasters! With updated Monitis Visitor Tracking service you can now monitor in real-time not only the number of visits and pageviews, but also get comprehensive statistics related to your visitors, such as their countries, cities, IPs, OSs used, browsers used, referrers, which show where they came from and keywords, which were used to find your site. So by combining every piece of information together, you will get an overall view and a better understanding of your web performance.

Countries and Cities view of your visitors widget will help you to find out if you targeted your products or services to the intended markets or not, or in case you do some advertisement if you are succeeding with it or not. You can see below some screenshots, which illustrate how visits demographic statistics will be shown on your dashboard.

The next important piece of information is the IPs of your visitors, which could be used to distinguish the ISPs your visitors use more often. By using this info you can find out why many of your visitors are using this ISP and not the other one. Maybe the problem is in your site’s slow response?

Operating Systems of your visitors will be of interest for you in case you’re selling some software products for specific OSs. So this info will help you to find out if your visitors would like to use your software or not. In case you see that most of your visitors are using an OSs which your product doesn’t support, maybe it will help you to decide to support that OS in the next release of your product.

On the other side for the providers of web services it will be more of interest to find out the popular browsers. In case you see that most of your visitors are using Firefox, but you know that IE is more widespread nowadays, you will try to find out the cause of this trend, maybe your website is not supporting well IE.

Finally, lets consider Referrers and Keywords statistics. Referrers will help you to monitor where your visitors come from, in case you’re running ad campaign somewhere, you can monitor if you succeed with it by looking on the number of visitors referred from the website your ad is placed on. Keywords  let you find out the words or phrases which your visitors are using in search engines and afterwards bring them to your website. This information will help you to optimize the site for search engines, better selecting and tuning keywords in the content of your page or blog.

We’ve now finished with the description of each piece of data, and we think this info will help online shops, service providers, and others to know  their visitors better, thus satisfy their needs better, which is the most important thing in every business nowadays.

We also provide these statistics in our free service at http://mon.itor.us, but in limited scope.

UK – 213.165.245.114
US – 208.76.244.82
DE – 80.190.241.157
PA – 190.5.236.105
AU – there is no permanent IP at the moment, will be in a couple of days, so for now you can open your firewall or exclude from the logs all the IPs in the following range 203.57.0.0/16

In this article I would like to explain status codes and other info provided in notification e-mails of Monitis for a services with HTTP checks.

HTTP protocol has the following types of error codes:

2xx – this codes indicate success

In recovery notifications you will often get 200 – OK HTTP response code, which means that the request was fulfilled.

4xx – codes are intended for cases in which the client seems to have errors

5xx – codes are intended for cases in which the server is aware that the server has errors

Most common errors of the above mentioned types are:

400 – the request had bad syntax or was inherently impossible to be satisfied

401 – the client should try the request with a suitable Authorization header

403 – the request is for something forbidden. Authorization will not help

404 – the server has not found anything matching the URI given

500 – the server encountered an unexpected condition which prevented it from fulfilling the request

Besides the above mentioned status codes during HTTP checks you will also get the following information:

Connection timed out after 10 sec. – which means that for some reasons monitoring server couldn’t conduct a check during 10 seconds

Connection refused – for some reasons monitored server refused the connection request from our monitoring server

Wrong response HTTP header received – monitoring server received a response with a wrong HTTP header

Connection lasted more than 10 seconds – which means that response has exceeded 10 seconds, which is set as a timeout for HTTP check

So here it is, we’re finished with HTTP checks and will discuss the other check types in the upcoming articles.