We recently offered our Monitis users a 10-question survey to prioritize features for our roadmap. Our first question was about the dashboard user interface. We listed several planned enhancements and asked the users to point out which are the most critical for them. Users identified several performance chart views as the most critical needs like a 24-hours view, 7-days view widgets, and views with flexible custom dates. We instantly put these requests in our next week plan and hope to deliver them to our users within the next 2 weeks. We also included other requests in our roadmap.

The next question was related to external monitoring. One of the highest requests was to add checks for broken website links. We are actually set to launch this service by the end of the next week. The early release will be a free service, and later it will be integrated with Monitis. It will daily crawl the complete user website and will find dead-end links. Also, people asked for more monitoring locations. We are going to add at least one more location in a week.

The next block was related to internal, agent-based server and network monitoring. The highest request was for advanced MySQL database monitoring. We already have it developed and will integrate it in the nearest future. It will definitely be live by the end of June. The next priority was identified as adding customized scripts for probes. Technically it is also ready, so we will try to move the launch earlier in our schedule. The automatic recovery scripts feature was a winner in the nice-to-have category. Next, was the users request to integrate SNMP monitoring with Monitis (which is currently a separate service at www.monitorsnmp.com). Again, we will have them live by the end of June.

More about the survey results in our next blog post.

Monitis Launches Public Reporting and Widgets

Monitis customers can demonstrate their site stability and availability to public.

Press Release

San Jose 22 May, 2009 -   Monitis Inc., a leading provider of affordable easy-to-use enterprise-class systems management software as a service, today announced a release of public reporting and widgets.  These features will allow Monitis service users to make their website’s uptime statistics publicly available.

Monitis provides many methods for viewing performance information and now added the ability to “open” performance reports on one or several of customer resources to public. The new features that enable these abilities are “public reports” and “public widgets”. Both of these features exist in Monitis free service and are requested by users and they are also of premium Monitis service. “Public reports” and “public widgets” provide the user with ways to show performance data publicly while lending credibility to a website.  Ideal for customers, these features help to prove how well a website performs.

Users can build their branded public reports. Monitis provides dedicated URLs to view these reports with or without password protection. The users will have the option to select the specific sites to be reported with these options: interval (weekly, daily, monthly), specific month, last month, or the current month. Monitis users are the creators of public reports, which they may choose to make available to all website visitors at their discretion.  Each report will be constantly updated, and will have a permanent URL.  Customers can use these reports to make it clear to visitors that their website is available at any time and to demonstrate how well their website performs. These reports may be used both by site owners and service providers.

Public widgets perform the similar function but right on customer’s website. As the public reports, users may decide which metrics they wish to display and which URLs they want to be tracked.  Monitis allows users to select fonts and text colors that match the rest of their pages for the HTML code which they may embed onto their pages.  Each Widget is updated to display over the past week or month, the performance and uptime. Widgets can objectively demonstrate the stability of the web page that shows how well the site has been doing recently. Stability is a major component of image, therefore, stability of operation and accessibility of your website is a part of your company. Monitis helps to strengthen its image and to do so recognizable to the public.

“With Monitis, our customers can let their web visitors know that the smooth and continuous functioning of their website is important to them.” said Hovhannes Avoyan, CEO of Monitis. “Monitis not only   helps you reach that goal, but also helps you demonstrate it to others.”

About Monitis Performance Monitor

Monitis Performance Monitor is an industry leading comprehensive, affordable, scalable, fault and performance management platform.  Monitis Performance Monitor monitors, collects and analyzes information from websites, servers, routers, switches, VoIP devices, DNS, databases, processes and any other IP devices providing users with a comprehensive view of their system health.  Open sourced Monitis plug-in with powerful API’s allow users to extend Monitis powerful monitoring and management capabilities.  Users can be assured of always on reliable service as Monitis Performance Monitor is deployed across the world providing resilient service.

About Monitis

Monitis is a leading provider of affordable performance monitoring and management solution. More than 50,000 customers spanning small businesses, Fortune 500 companies, government agencies and education institutions have chosen Monitis to reduce system downtime, improve IT administrator productivity, and reduce operational expenditure.  Monitis is radically changing system monitoring and management landscape by providing easy to use, affordable, flexible (deployment configurations include: shared, internal cloud and external cloud), and simple to manage SaaS performance monitoring and management solution. For more information, please visit http://www.monitis.com

Contacts:

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, San Jose, CA-95134, USA

Another enhancement to currently existing reports was introduced by Monitis Team couple of days ago, that is “Public Report”.  Users can build their branded public reports, which means they can provide their logos that will be visible on the top of their public reports. Monitis provides dedicated URLs to view these reports with or without password protection. The users will have the option to select the specific sites to be reported with these options: interval (weekly, daily, monthly), specific month, last month, or the current month. Monitis users are the creators of public reports, which they may choose to make available to all website visitors at their discretion.  Each report will be constantly updated, and will have a permanent URL.  Customers can use these reports to make it clear to visitors that their website is available at any time and to demonstrate how well their website performs. These reports may be used both by site owners and service providers. In order to generate a public report you need to check the “Public Report” option when adding any report from New Report->External. For existing reports you can find this option in the edit mode of the report. You can see an example of such a report below.

Those of you who were using our free version mon.itor.us are already familiar with public widgets. Now this feature is also available in Monitis. Users can decide which metrics they wish to display and which URLs they want to be tracked. Monitis allows users to select fonts and text colors that match the rest of their pages for the HTML code which they may embed into their pages. Each Widget is updated to display over the past week or month, the performance and uptime. Widgets can objectively demonstrate the stability of the web page that shows how well the site has been doing recently. Stability is a major component of image, therefore, stability of operation and accessibility of your website is a part of your company. Monitis helps to strengthen its image and to do so recognizable to the public. Widget can be created by the following Tools->Public Widget menu item. Below you can see an example of such a widget, which can be embedded into your website.

Today downloads of Monitis Firefox add-on(Monifox) reached the first milestone of 100 downloads. It was experimentally launched last week and it is already gaining big popularity. For those who are not still  using it or aren’t aware, can do that by following this link https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/10794. Your reviews are welcomed.

External Monitoring

• “User Agent” of external checks can be defined from Options, which will help to identify and filter requests from external monitoring probes in the logs. In some cases it will help to set up the User Agent the way which results in the correct response of the particular website.
• Calendar is added to the external monitors so it is more convenient to browser older data
• Embeddable public widget is added which allows to put it on your website
• Public report option is added, which provides a link to show your report to your visitors
• Improvements related to Maintenance Scheduling
• Possibility of selecting Australian location from the notification rules
• Possibility to deselect US location when adding new monitor and in the notification rules

Internal Monitoring

• Weekly reports will be sent every week showing statistics related to internal monitors
• “Agent is not running” alert can be set up from the Options in order to receive warning notifications in case something is wrong with connection between the monitored server and Monitis Central Server.

General

• Launch of new portal
• New type of monitoring is introduced namely – Amazon EC2 instance monitoring

To start using EC2 monitoring you can either sign up for a trial plan, which includes 2 EC2 instance monitoring possibility for 15 days, sign up for Plus plan in case you will need only 1 EC2 instance monitoring or build your plan yourself in order to have some flexibility in case the number of your instances is increasing or decreasing. After you have finished with the above mentioned steps, just login using your credentials and follow these steps to add EC2 monitor:

Step1: In this step you’re providing your Amazon account credentials. Please make sure that your private key name is exactly the same as the one you started your instance with. 

Step 2: In this step you’re going to add your contact(e-mail, IM or SMS) in order to be able to receive alerts related to your EC2 instances. You can skip timezone, send weekly reports, and contact group fields for now and change them later.

Step 3: In this step you will setup notification rules for your currently running instances, more clearly you will specify the max number of running instances allowed, your contact which we’ve added in the previous step, so you will get alert when the number of your currently running instances reaches your specify threshold.

Step 4: In this step you will setup policies(different monitors) you want each of your instances be monitored for. Please make sure to provide correctly your private key in Step 1, in order our agent can be automatically installed on your instance.

Step 4 is finalizing EC2 monitor setup process. The following module will be added automatically to your dashboard.

Drive, CPU, Load Average, Memory columns are related to internal policies selection and in case you’ve selected any of these during Step 4,  but you still see “Activate” values for them that means that something is wrong with agent installation(most probably related to your provided private key). HTTP, PING, SSH are checking your instance(s) from our monitoring locations and don’t require anything to be installed on your instance. Other configuration related columns like Instance ID, Image ID, Public DNS, Launch Time, Availability Zones and Key Name are gathered and shown automatically.

That’s it, your EC2 instance monitoring is up and running.

Monitis has reached 500 Twitter followers at http://twitter.com/monitis . We use Twitter to inform our community about upcoming events and releases. Our users may also submit feedbacks and messages via Twitter.

Latest Monitis service automates Amazon EC2 monitoring

Press Release

San Jose 12 May, 2009 – Monitis launches industry’s first deep EC2 monitoring service. Monitis Cloud Monitor records instantiations and terminations of virtual server instances, automatically configures Monitis agents for deep fault, performance and configuration monitoring, and provisions external availability monitoring.

Cloud computing enables companies to attain scale on demand and hence reduced capital investments. Amazon’s Web Services package is the market leader for on demand dedicated server provisioning and cloud computing. Virtual machine instantiation in Amazon EC2 is a minute and click away. Both startups and established companies are increasingly leveraging EC2 in their production systems. EC2 allows companies to scale to unlimited servers and payment can be tied to actual usage instead of monthly contracts. Users can run 20 servers per 1 hour or 1 server per 20 hour at the same cost. Software can launch additional services on demand including ability to scale when it experiences heavy load. This has potential to create the following problems for the administrator: 1) cost escalation due to uncontrolled service launch and 2) inability for monitoring service to handle dynamic server instantiation.

Monitis Cloud Monitor provides control over services running in EC2 by leveraging Amazon’s API for automated service management. Cloud Monitor leverages AWS account detail to regularly poll active instances, record changes in instance (start/stop) and executes user defined rules & actions including: ability to issue alerts, and setup additional internal/external monitors for new instances. Monitis automatically configures its agent for probing server CPU, load, storage, and processes resource utilization. Monitis service provisions external http, ping, database and/or custom monitoring. An example of custom monitoring includes notification rules such as “notify if greater than 5 instances are running”, “add an agent for every new instance, start CPU & storage monitoring, and notify if CPU utilization is more than 80%”, etc.

“There is tremendous growth in on demand cloud computing and we see growing need for explicit cloud monitoring” said Hovhannes Avoyan, “with our customer first policy, we are here to address the need and we provide a fast, easy, affordable tool”. Monitis Cloud Monitor is web centric software and no downloads are required. The service is expected to be used by both site owners and IT service providers.

About Monitis Performance Monitor 

Monitis Performance Monitor is an industry leading comprehensive, affordable, scalable, fault and performance management platform.  Monitis Performance Monitor monitors, collects and analyzes information from websites, servers, routers, switches, VoIP devices, DNS, databases, processes and any other IP devices providing users with a comprehensive view of their system health.  Open sourced Monitis plug-in with powerful API’s allow users to extend Monitis powerful monitoring and management capabilities.  Users can be assured of always on reliable service as Monitis Performance Monitor is deployed across the world providing resilient service.

About Monitis

Monitis is a leading provider of affordable performance monitoring and management solution. More than 50,000 customers spanning small businesses, Fortune 500 companies, government agencies and education institutions have chosen Monitis to reduce system downtime, improve IT administrator productivity, and reduce operational expenditure.  Monitis is radically changing system monitoring and management landscape by providing easy to use, affordable, flexible (deployment configurations include: shared, internal cloud and external cloud), and simple to manage SaaS performance monitoring and management solution. For more information, please visit http://www.monitis.com

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, San Jose, CA-95134, USA