Here is a Monitis case study kindly provided by our customer:

“Mayflower Capital AG is a German company that provides financial services to private clients. The company was founded in September 2007 and started operations in June 2008. Claiming ourselves as a Startup Company, today we operate more than 80 clients across 12 branch offices.

Our branch offices are located in main cities and connected via IPSEC-VPN service to the datacenter. Thereby, we were facing multiple challenges:

1. Monitoring the VPN-Connection between the datacenter and individual branch office. Merely, monitoring the Internet-access from the branch office does not meet the requirements, as the VPN-Tunnel may also be interrupted.
2. Finding the suitable strategy to monitor our Internet Systems.
3. How would we able to obtain information about the performance of our systems which implies application performance via Intranet and Internet.
4. How can we automate warning in the event of disruption or poor performance; which are the notification feeds to be used (Email, SMS, IM, Twitter).
5. Whether it is possible to evade the price of internal resources as it is not necessary to implement a system ourselves.
6. The solution should be adorable and low budget.
7. Need of a reliable service.

We examined several services in the web that assured to satisfy our needs. Mon.itor.us fits this requirement, because it has the ability to view both external tests and internal tests on a single graphical user interface for maximum efficiency.
We have now upgraded to Monitis which provides us with a poll interval of 5 minutes allowing us to view every VPN-Tunnel in our system in real time and determine if the telephone systems are available, watch the performance of our CRM-System, and obtain status information from our homepage. The feature most important to our system is the one that provides maximum confidence by quickly alarming us of incidents BEFORE being alerted by our users. With this system, users can be sure that we will know of and be prepared to handle each and every incident.”

Cloud computing is a way to make use of computer resources over and across the Internet, rather than using servers that are physically within your control. Cloud computing users do not need to have any knowledge of, or expertise in, the technology infrastructure in the “cloud” that supports them, and they don’t control the technical infrastructure. Cloud computing is dynamically scalable, which offers important benefits, and also offers businesses many advantages in capacity and capability. However, cloud computing is a rapidly changing environment where you have little control over your configuration. The constantly changing realm of cloud computer allows you to react very quickly to changing loads, but also requires you to better manage that environment to maintain control.

With cloud computing, the customers, generally speaking, do not own the physical infrastructure hosting their software. Instead, they use the cloud resource as a service and pay only for what they use. Because they don’t “own”the cloud, cloud customers need more visibility into the cloud. Customers using cloud infrastructure, however, need greater transparency of information to make sure the services are running properly. The cloud monitoring system  gives customers the similar management capabilities they are accustomed to from in-house systems when they use a cloud provider.

Press Release

San Jose 22 July, 2009 Monitis Inc., a leading provider of enterprise-class systems management software as a service, launches a command line interface for its premiere on-demand cloud-based monitoring platform. Command-line tools will make the job of IT systems administrators automated and productive.

Utilizing the command line is the quickest, simplest, and most efficient way to get a job done.  While many computer users have become dependent on graphics-based programs, the most skilled and accomplished computer users know that the command line (i.e., terminal) is still the best tool for getting the job done.  With a few key tools and computer skills any computer user can take advantage of the benefits of using the command line with the help of Monitis.  Monitis’ Command Line Tools (Monitis CLT) running from the Linux/UNIX or Windows command line allows the user to easily run most Monitis tasks and functions through use of the Monitis API in place of a web interface.

A CLI or command-line interface gives users the ability to interact with a computer’s operating system or software by typing simple commands.  Experienced users, programmers, network and system administrators, and those in scientific fields most often make use of CLI, although those with visual impairments also find the type-based nature of CLI useful.  CLI offers two distinct advantages to users overall:  the ability to script a set of commands to perform tasks or executables and the ability to work faster with fewer commands than a GUI user.

Although Monitis CLT is still in an early version, there are still many services available to users, ranging from a list of monitoring locations, a list of added monitors, performance monitoring results, and top issues in overall tests. They can also build their own workflows using shell scripts. The output can be saved as a plain text file or as comma separated values (CSV). The files can be later opened in Excel or Word for performance or failure root cause analysis. In the future, Monitis will support all the functions available in the web version.

The benefits of Monitis command line tools are amazing.  Whether you are an IT developer or administrator, you will enjoy a number of convenient features.  Easy integration with our enterprise software, automated management duties, use of Excel or Word to review performance data, fast and convenient terminal interface access (especially convenient for Linux/Unix administrators), and the ability to make custom enhancements to Monitis functions, are all part of the experience.  Users can use the web application interface or Monitis portal to download the tools.  Monitis command line tools go beyond the existing Monitis iGoogle widgets and Firefox plug-in.  IT professionals will find innovative ways to manage data on how well the system is functioning.

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

We have now more than 1,000 followers on our Monitis Twitter Page! We are posting informal pre-announcements at Twitter even before submitting public press releases; so add yourself if you want to know about our upcoming releases ahead of time. You can also use Twitter to get Monitis alerts when your network, server or application is slow or failed.

Press Release
San Jose 20 July, 2009 Monitis Inc., a leading provider of enterprise-class systems management software as a service, launches a new free service for website administrators. Links-Checker checks websites links daily and reports broken and dead-end links to users.

Links-Checker is a free service that you can use to monitor your website for dead-end and broken links. Clicking on links that go nowhere is very aggravating for the people visiting your website.  Maybe you deleted old material that is outdated, but forgot that other pages provided a link for that; or maybe you provided a link to some other site that has ceased to be.  There does exist a free service to help you with this problem: Links-Checker.  Links-Checker will read the pages you specify, and check out all the links, and return a report to you about the status of all the links on those pages. This process will be repeated until your entire website has been examined.  You can provide multiple contacts for reporting issues found, so that you can rectify your problems in a timely manner, for the convenience of your website visitors.

It is not easy to keep website pages consistent and working well.  You want your websites to be found in search engines and working well when people are navigating through it.  404 errors occur when broken links are found and hinders search engine success.  Each broken link makes it harder for sites to reach the top of the search engine results.  Search engines will give you a lower ranking if your site has many errors.  Links-Checker will increase your traffic and improve your search engine rank by quickly and simply testing the links from your site. Links-Checker service was among the most frequently requested new features.

“Monitis works hard to give you the best and easiest to use network and systems monitoring software available.” said Hovhannes Avoyan, CEO of Monitis. “IT managers, network administrators, and systems operators will appreciate the time they can save due to our unique cloud-based systems design.   Our services can be configured quickly and are user-friendly, and we help our customers efficiently maintain high uptime. We are also committed to provide free SaaS (software as a service) tools and Links-Checker is new to our line of monitoring services, like free website monitoring service mon.itor.us and the network monitoring service monitorSNMP (http://monitorsnmp.com).  In the near future, we will add more SaaS-based solutions to our line.”  Monitis cloud-based services can make website maintenance a breeze for website owners. Systems faults and performance monitoring, as well as their newest product Lines-Checker, will save for them considerable time and money while keeping their websites running smoothly.

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

The acronym LAMP refers to a stack of free, open source software used together to run Web sites and services. The expansion of the acronym is: Linux (operating system), Apache (web server), MySQL (database), and PHP, Perl, or Python (scripting language). Though the creators of these open source technologies did not design them all to work specifically with each other, the combination has become popular because of its low cost and the ubiquity and familiarity of its components. When used together, they are a robust stack of technologies with a wide range of applications.

The LAMP software stack (Linux, Apache, MySQL, and PHP/Python) is very popular with the new generation of Web 2.0 services. These services provide high uptime and good performance for such applications as gaming, educational and corporate portals, e-commerce and travel reservations, and many others. However, many issues such as database performance, hardware failure, application bugs, DoS attacks, and others can negatively impact the performance of your LAMP service. The best practice is to monitor key performance indicators and set up notification rules so that you can respond quickly to failures and limit downtime.

The first step of the process is the simple and installer-free process of adding external availability and performance monitors; we recommend setting Monitis external HTTP monitors for front page applications and important dynamic pages in addition to doing the same for important files such as scripts and flash items. Furthermore, a simple ping setup allows the user to check if the server is available. You also have the option to ping the router and firewall, giving the chance to determine where the failure is located in the larger system. SSH users can also set up SSH monitoring, if SSH fails but the overall system remains active, you can isolate the SSH problem specifically. MySQL monitoring is an important part as well and the user must make sure it is accessible from the Monitis IP addresses. DNS checks provide a final preventative measure against early problems with your DNS.

After completing the setup of external monitoring for your application server, you’ll need to set up internal server resource monitoring. It will help with both troubleshooting and prevention of failures. After installing Monitis agent on your server (Windows, Linux, Solaris, FreeBSD and Mac agents are available), add the following server monitors from the Monitis web interface: Linux average load, CPU, hard disk space, and memory consumption. The threshold for average load should be set at 10-15 for notification. Set reasonable threshold for the free memory and hard disk space monitors as well. The Apache/PHP and MySQL processes should also be monitored. Set the threshold for CPU utilization per server and per process (60-70%), especially for MySQL. It is often the cause of poor performance. Setting low threshold may result in large number of alerts, too high may trigger an alert when the situation on server is already critical.

For a greater comfort level, we recommend using Monitis Application and Transaction monitoring service. It is very helpful with complex multi-step applications such as online reservations, e-commerce, online banking, and Web 2.0 services. It is similar to external monitoring, but it is able to check the complete application flow in one check. Monitis provides the Transaction Recorder plug-in for your browser. In your browser, you can record a script by navigating through application pages and adding checkpoints. Upload the script to the Monitis server to have Monitis check your application on regular intervals. With all of the Monitis checks combined, 100% application uptime for your users is much closer to a reality.

Monitis Enables Amazon Payments

Monitis users can pay also using their Amazon accounts.

San Jose 14 July, 2009 Monitis Inc., a leading provider of cloud-based enterprise-class systems management software as a service, today announces the possibility to pay for Monitis services using Amazon payment. Users can now use their pre-existing Amazon.com accounts for payments.

Monitis offers the ability for people who use an Amazon payment account to use the Amazon account for payment of Monitis services. It delivers the following benefits for customers: convenience, trusted payment experience, and purchase protection from Amazon. Customers use their pre-existing Amazon.com account to pay for Monitis systems monitoring services, including EC2 monitoring.  There will be no need for them to retype payment information.  Furthermore, customers will experience the trusted security of Amazon.com, from the familiarity of the payment process through the Amazon Guarantee.

Customers will have the option of choosing one of Monitis’ standard systems and cloud monitoring plans or creating a custom plan using the easy-to-use Monitis custom plan builder and then will choose Amazon as their payment method during the checkout process.  The customer will then be forwarded to the Amazon website in order to log into their Amazon account to authorize the payment or subscription.  The service is quite simple; users need not provide credit card details and will provide impressive convenience for Amazon Cloud Computing customers, also known as Amazon Web Services (AWS).  The same Amazon.com account allows them to pay for Amazon services, as well as for monitoring using Monitis’ recently launched Amazon EC2 monitoring service.

“We are 100% committed to user satisfaction,” stressed Hovhannes Avoyan, the Monitis CEO.  “We know our customers need applications that are easy to start, easy to use and fast to deploy.  Our goal is to constantly monitor our entire process — from trial sign-up to payment — for ease of use.” A host of new Monitis features will be announced later this week and during the summer, in addition to the great lineup of services and features already available.

About Monitis Performance Monitor
Monitis Performance Monitor is an industry leading comprehensive, affordable, scalable, fault and performance management software as a service.  Monitis Cloud-Based 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 software as a service. 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://portal.monitis.com

Monitis customers can now monitor Sun Solaris machines.

Press Release

San Jose 14 July, 2009 Monitis Inc., a leading provider of cloud-based enterprise-class systems management software as a service, today announces the release of remote monitoring agent for Solaris platform from Sun Microsystems.

Monitis monitoring agent is a small-footprint, easy to install code that is part of Monitis cloud based, distributed monitoring platform.  The agent runs on clients’ machines, collecting and transmitting information on performance and configuration of the machine, as well as the whole local network, including other servers and devices.  The information gathered is transmitted to the central Monitis server, through corporate firewalls. The new agent is available for installation on both Intel and Sparc versions of Solaris OS from Sun Microsystems, provided as open source.

The central application takes steps to find out and check agent breakdown. By receiving messages on a regular basis form agents, Monitis will be able to decide whether there is a problem. If there is one, corrective measures will be taken. Agents never use local storage, and hence, any information gathered is recorded in a separate central database on the main server. As agents use HTTPS protocol to transfer data, it is not necessary for them to have changes on the firewalls. The whole process- right from the user registration to the establishment of remote monitor- will be completed within a few minutes.

Both Linux and Windows agents are largely used by the Monitis community, which numbers up to 50,000 users.  Recently, FreeBSD support was added, and this, combined with the new Solaris addition, allows users to monitor true distributed and heterogeneous infrastructure.  Monitis combines the robust features of agent-based technology with the simplicity of agent-less technology.  This combination enables effortless systems management for its customers.

About Monitis Performance Monitor

Monitis Performance Monitor is an industry leading comprehensive, affordable, scalable, fault and performance management software as a service.  Monitis Cloud-Based 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 software as a service. 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

Monitis is the premier provider of Systems Monitoring Software-as-a-Service (SaaS). SaaS solution offers customers many advantages:

• 1. Rapid instant application deployment.
• 2. Enable high levels of user adoption, easy-to-use, quick learning.
• 3. No capital expenses (capex), easy decision making and approval.
• 4. Lower total cost of ownership (TCO). In case of multi-tenant application multiple users are sharing common infrastructure and software.
• 5. Extensive features, functionality and configurability.
• 6. Pay as you go, pay for what you use, easy plan upgrade.
• 7. No server, no software setup.
• 8. Secure, scalable and reliable delivery platform.
• 9. Always the latest version of software.
• 10. Innovative software with frequent updates.