I read in an article on cloud computing where Ray Ozzie, Microsoft’s chief software architect, predicted a successful venture into cloud computing with its Azure service – even if most people don’t know it’s there.

Sounds kind of ironic, yes? But then again, I guess the cloud is most successful to IT business folks and consumers when it runs so smoothly and problem-free that they don’t even know it’s there.

Azure, set to launch on January 1^st, will run customers’ applications on its servers and provide capacity through its massive data centers. “For consumers, the best result of cloud computing is that they don’t notice it,” Ozzie told Reuters at Microsoft’s annual developers conference.

But he also made the good point that if cloud computing works right, it should be invisible for businesses as well. “Companies that are not in IT — like retailers and manufacturing companies — still deal with their customers on the web,” said Ozzie, in the story. “Azure allows us to do the hard work of figuring out how to build those really high-scale systems that deal with all the consumers, and it lets businesses focus on what they are good at.”

Another good point: the cloud’s scalability. Ozzie said that “If you have an application that you’d like to run and just try it a little, you only end up paying a little, and if your demand gets greater and greater, then we just turn up the dial and we give you more and more.”

And I like that he acknowledged the risk that many companies feel in switching to the cloud from internal servers and data centers. After all, it remains a big topic and point of concern among businesses – despite the advances being made in cloud computing security.

“Customers are very pragmatic, they figure out the right way to connect the old with the new,” he said. “For every given application, a camera, a phone, there’s some good combination of software in the device and in the cloud. Making them work together is what we are trying to do.”

Of course, thousands of businesses that already do business on the cloud employ complementary strategies to make their data safer and website transactions trouble-free, one of which is cloud-based monitoring services that provide warnings – via everything from emails, SMSs and Twitter – should things go wrong . You can never be too safe.

If you’re shopping around for a company that monitors your website transactions, servers or networks, there are many points of comparison that would be worth your time covering in a request for proposal process. But here are some major points that are worthwhile asking a potential vendor:

- How quickly and efficiently can you update your monitoring tools to reflect the latest technological innovations?

- Does the process require downtime or reduced bandwidth that will take resources away from your ability to monitor my site or server?

Cloud – a Nice, Fluffy Model

One of the beautiful things about SaaS models and cloud computing is the ease and timeliness of updating software. Just listen to our own history of providing monitoring service off the cloud and the resources it took to serve clients:

Before we started Monitis, we were developing all sorts of web applications and we were managing them over more than 2,000 servers in multiple data centers. Ugh! We were using multiple tools to monitor and manage budgets, servers, software, storage, updates and access. But none were providing the level of efficiency that we required.

Yet, at the same time, we already had plenty of experience under our belts developing enterprise software, and we were amazed at the speed of development of web applications. So, we decided to merge the best of the two worlds and launch from the cloud.

Advantages of Cloud Monitoring

Now, we’re no longer stuck sitting in data centers or near servers into the wee hours of the morning monitoring semi-automatic processes. Remote access has solved that challenge.

We don’t need special servers to host monitoring solutions – reducing costs so we can pass savings along to our clients. And because of the cloud, IT teams everywhere (not just us) no longer need to worry about software upgrades of monitoring software and how well (or poorly) the new software integrates into their existing systems.

Another advantage: IT consultants don’t have to waste time traveling between clients in order to monitor anything. Instead they can expand their client list simply from the time they’ve gained from avoiding travel.

Hosting companies and other managed-service/cloud-service providers can white label a whole new set of tools creating additional revenue streams, and take advantage of opportunities to enhance customer satisfaction.

So, if you’re an IT manager or consultant investigating reliable and affordable monitoring services, make sure you put a lot of thought into the advantages of the cloud’s infrastructure and ease of use and maintenance when picking a vendor.

For more information on cloud-based application, network and server monitoring services, check out the advantages that award-winning Monitis offers.

In the early 19^th century, the famous advice “Go West, Young Man” was given to U.S. Easterners eager to explore the riches and opportunities of an expanding still-wild West in America. Now, it seems “Go East, All Who Follow the Cloud” should be the guiding advice.

I saw a recent news story that said Amazon Web Services (AWS), the cloud computing platform, will expand into the Asia Pacific region during the first half of 2010 – beginning with a zone in Singapore, to be followed by others around the region in the second half of the year. Software developers and businesses storing data and using cloud-based apps will be able to access Amazon’s infrastructure services from those zones.

Asia Pacific customers will be able to access the following Amazon Services:

-Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2)

- Amazon Simple Storage Service (Amazon S3)

- Amazon SimpleDB

-Amazon Relational Database Service (Amazon RDS)

- Amazon Simple Queue Service (Amazon SQS)

-Amazon Elastic MapReduce

- Amazon CloudFront

In the story, I also noticed that Amazon also put out a new software development kit for .NET and support for private content in Amazon CloudFront – the company’s content delivery service. This is the kind of support that enables, say, a website that sells digital products, to restrict downloadable merchandise to paying customers.

I like to hear about the development of support services that make companies feel more secure about doing business on the cloud. We have enough examples of security breaches, outages and other cloud snags that make consumers and businesses jittery. And, of course, I think supplemental services for website owners, such as website transaction monitoring and incidence notifications, go a long way to increasing a sense of security.

San Jose, CA – November 24, 2009 – Monitis, the leading provider of affordable, easy-to-use, 100% Cloud-based, network and systems monitoring solutions, today announced a another major release in its crusade to save IT managers’ time – a Universal Cloud Monitoring Framework that enables external and internal monitoring from all Cloud hosting providers.

Until today, Monitis was providing monitoring only for Amazon’s EC2 and S3 services. With the release of its Universal Cloud Monitoring Framework, Monitis can now sync to other Cloud computing providers very quickly – from Rackspace, GoGrid, Softlayer, and more. Monitis’ Universal Cloud Monitoring Framework will automate monitoring in highly dynamic cloud environments, where customers’ servers maybe added and terminated according to the load by management software or manually.

Given this dynamism, setting up end-user experience monitoring can become a tedious, resource intensive and error-prone process. Monitis’ Universal Cloud Monitoring Framework automates the configuration of external monitoring and server monitoring tools every time a new installation is called for – saving IT managers and system administrators around the world enormous time and hassle.

In addition to saving IT managers’ time, Monitis’ Universal Cloud Monitoring Framework gives users the confidence that comes from using a 3^rd party tool to monitor Cloud infrastructure in an independent manner.  Even when Cloud computing providers provide some sort of monitoring, there is an inherent conflict of interest – as they are keen to show higher uptime. By providing a customized, independent audit of SLAs (service level agreements), Monitis’ Universal Cloud Monitoring Framework increases the credibility of Cloud computing providers claims, which ultimately benefits both users and the industry, as a whole.

“We are passionate about one thing: saving IT managers’ massive amounts of time. The release of our Universal Cloud Monitoring Framework does just that.” said Monitis’ Founder and CEO, Hovhannes Avoyan. “It is also the first sortie in our move to become the industry standard for monitoring from the Cloud. We are already far, far ahead of the rest of the competition, but watch this space – more exciting things are yet to come!”

About Monitis All-in-One Monitoring Platform

Monitis is the only service which provides Cloud 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 backend monitoring, application monitoring, website monitoring, and cloud monitoring in an all-in-one, central 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. Recently, because it’s Cloud-based monitoring helps companies reduce system downtime, improve the productivity of their IT staff, and reduce operational expenditures, Monitis was named the Most Innovative Start-up for 2009 by The 451 Group at their annual Client Conference.  

Monitis was founded in 2005 by a team of seasoned entrepreneurs and fed-up and worn-out developers who were tired of complaining about the limits of software-based tools, while inspired by the promise of the Cloud.  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 revenue 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

I’ve been a proponent of cloud-based monitoring of networks, sites, servers, applications and transactions, etc., for a long time. I’m such a nut about it because I know what a revolutionary convenience it is for companies to not have to devote all kinds of resources, time and money to making sure their web businesses are running smoothly.

And I know, personally, having come from the old-fashioned environment where you ran monitoring software on internal servers, and you couldn’t do anything remotely, what that was like. The time, the money, the energy used up!

So, I was surprised to read (but not really because I knew it would come some day) that Hyperic, one of the second-generation monitoring companies, introduced an upgrade to its platforms that lets IT managers monitor virtual environments, better plan for capacity and track performance of services delivered via cloud computing.

Hyperic ‘s cloud monitoring capabilities in this release is focused on Amazon Web Services. Company officials say it is experienced managing private clouds of 3,500-plus VMware and XenServer virtualization deployments, according to the article I read.

My competitive juices start racing whenever I read about new competitors. And in this case, even though we’re a young company and Hyperic’s been around for about five years now, I consider them a competitor – because they’re just now developing monitoring for the cloud.

But let me ask out loud, is Hyperic’s cloud monitoring service really a cloud tool? That’s a question, honestly.

They’re calling it an upgrade, yes, as in upgrade to software (HQ 4.0)? Looks to me like it is still relying on software to monitor – rather than using the truly virtual infrastructure of the cloud and all its benefits for monitoring.

Just my thoughts!

San Jose, CA – November 19, 2009 – Monitis, the leading provider of affordable, easy-to-use, 100% Cloud-based, application, network and server monitoring solutions, today announced a major upgrade to its premium service, which now includes enterprise-grade SNMP network monitoring.  Monitis has long offered a free SNMP monitoring product called MonitorSNMP.  But with this upgrade, Monitis integrates all of MonitorSNMP’s features plus a host of new and more advanced features into its premium Monitis service.

This new release close a major gap in delivering a true, all-in-one monitoring solution that unites application performance management (APM) with back-end server, Cloud infrastructure, network monitoring, and network management to deliver a consolidated picture of a system’s health and performance.

According to Hovhannes Avoyan, Monitis’ Founder and CEO, “This upgrade is a torpedo in the rudder of old-school, software-based network monitoring software and network management software.  With it, we’ve removed any reason for network managers and system administrators to stay bound by inefficient software-based systems, and we’ve given them every reason to switch to Monitis.  We’ve just changed the rules of network performance management again.”

SNMP or Simple Network Management Protocol is a network based protocol used for monitoring network-attached devices for conditions that warrant administrative attention.  It is a standard protocol used by all network equipment vendors for managing and monitoring switches, routers, access points, VPNs, firewalls, VoIP devices and more. SNMP is also widely used by software vendors for remote management.  SNMP monitoring is a standard feature supported by software-based network management systems. 

Monitis’ MonitorSNMP has been a free service for more than 11 months, and now Monitis launches its premium version, which will provide more advanced features, including:

-  MIB views

-  SNMP traps (SNMP notifications) monitoring

-  SNMP walk (an SNMP application allowing the user to gather a tree of information)

-  1 min interval monitoring

-  events’ filtering

-  and advanced notification rules giving the user an integrated holistic picture

Monitis’ SNMP monitoring can be used by small and medium size enterprises (SMEs), freelancers and managed service providers (MSPs).Monitis’ SNMP monitoring enables network monitoring at anytime from anywhere, with hassle-free deployment and updates, and easy management and usage. 

This upgrade also enhances support of features already present in the free version, such as MIB viewers, custom MIBs (Objects managed by SNMP are arranged in management information bases (MIBs). MIB is a collection of hierarchically organized information used to manage the devices in a communications network.  MIB comprises a collection of objects in the virtual database used to manage entities, such as routers and switches in a network).  

About Monitis All-in-One Monitoring Platform

Monitis is a 100% Cloud-based, complete, and flexible IT monitoring solution, offered on a Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) model.  Monitis consolidates backend network and server monitoring, application monitoring, website monitoring, and cloud monitoring in an all-in-one, central 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.   Recently, because it’s Cloud-based monitoring helps companies reduce system downtime, improve the productivity of their IT staff, and reduce operational expenditures, Monitis was named the Most Innovative Start-up for 2009 by The 451 Group at their annual Client Conference.  

Monitis was founded in 2005 by a team of seasoned entrepreneurs and fed-up and worn-out developers who were tired of complaining about the limits of software-based tools, while inspired by the promise of the Cloud.  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 revenue 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

I’m very excited to tell you that Monitis won top showing in the Innovators Showcase during The 451 Group’s recent 4^th Annual Client Conference in Boston. This is a very proud moment for me and my colleagues.

We were part of a group of six technology companies that 451 Group invited. We all got a chance to present our services and products (ours was called “Monitoring in the Cloud: Monitor Anything from Anywhere”) to the audience of 300 or so attendees (venture capitalists, investment bankers, enterprise IT end users, software and hardware vendors and system integrators). Attendees had 451 Group scrip, which they then used to award as facsimile investment dollars to the most deserving of us. Monitis received the most investment scrip.

Why did we win? Well, I think that, a lot of people already understand that the cloud promises to make it a lot easier for companies to access applications and store a kajillion Gigs of data or so without investing tons of money and using up precious internal resources. But what I think a lot of folks don’t realize yet is that the cloud is also rapidly becoming home base to innovative service industries – such as Monitis’s cloud-based monitoring.

I was impressed by the level of interest among the investors in how we can use the cloud to monitor everything from sites to servers to networks to printers to SMS and so on. And I think we demonstrated very effectively how doing it via the cloud saves companies money and labor and allows them to put those dollars or euros or whatever where they want it: in growth strategies. And that’s nothing to turn your nose up at during these rough economic times.

Also, my thanks to Schoolwires, Inc., a company that provides strategic online communication, website and community management and productivity solutions to K-12 schools. They were there in Boston giving us a testimonial, and I’m grateful for their support. Schoowires has been using our all-in-one suite of cloud-based monitoring tools for more than two years to track and report on activity on the 1,200-plus web sites they manages. And they’ve reaped major efficiencies and reduced costs, among other benefits.

We were up against some pretty tough competition in the Innovators Showcase, and I was impressed by everybody’s presentations, too. Congrats to everyone who participated!

Content Management Systems (CMSs) help you collaboratively create and edit content such as news articles, manuals, guides, images, videos, and brochures and other publications. There are so many that are available on the web as downloadable apps that I’m certain you’ll find one that fits your needs.

This is what they’ve got going for them:

A – They’re easy to install and use;

B – They give you ready-made templates and customized features;

C – They’re free.

I thought it would be cool to share some reviews of some of the more popular CMSs that I recently ran across. Here they are:

Express Engine:

This is a feature-rich and fast CMS, enabling users to have multiple sites running on a single installation. Users can run blogs, community forums, knowledge-base, wiki, contact forms, search engines and more. And Express Engine has a template engine that has custom global variables, custom SQL queries and a built in versioning system that is appreciated by web designers. Plus, its core plan is free.

Radiant CMS:

Radiant is an open source CMS that’s specially designed for small businesses. Some of its features: flexible templating with layouts, snippets, page parts, and a custom tagging language. Radiant has a special macro language (similar to HTML) called Radius which makes it easy to include content from other pages. It’s free, too.

WordPress:

WordPress is the most popular CMS for bloggers because the system allows them to start blogging immediately. It’s very easy to “get,” with a short learning curve. WordPress has an excellent documentation and super-quick installation wizard.  It also offers a WYSIWYG (what you see is what you get) editor for people who don’t know HTML or other markup language. WordPress also comes with built-in image and multimedia uploading support. Again, another freebie.

CushyCMS:

Specially designed for content editors and designers, CushyCMS allows users to safely edit content of web pages. Cushy features allow users to create standards-compliant and search engine-friendly content. Free, also.

Drupal:

This is an open source platform enabling users to easily publish, manage and organize a wide variety of content on a website. Optional modules add interesting features like forums, picture galleries, file uploads and downloads, user blogs, OpenID, profiles and more.  Drupal is also free.

TYPO3:

TYPO3 is very user-friendly and intuitive. It offers extensive features including rich text editor, spell checker, configurable UI levels, multiple page editing, internal shortcuts, “live” search & replace, task center, internal search engine etc. You can also create templates in designer-friendly applications such as Adobe Photoshop or Macromedia Dreamweaver. TYPO3 is a free tool.

For IT managers and end-users alike, today’s cloud computing infrastructure seems almost too simple and uncomplicated – compared to the first generation of complex and resource-heavy network and systems management tools.

A Rich Man’s Club

First of all, systems management was a rich man’s club. The domain belonged to the big four: IBM, HP, CA (formerly Computer Associates) and BMC Software and their legendary products – OpenView, Tivoli, Unicenter and BMC Patrol. They invented and dominated the market.

Not such a terrible thing – at first – because they offered amazing tools. But they were very expensive, unbelievably complex, and it required people with PhDs to operate, install and maintain. Installation alone took months…even, in some cases, years!

But there were no viable alternatives. So, professional-grade tools were only for big companies that could afford paying $1 million or more (and up-front, too). Alternatives grew, but—even today—the big four still own 40% of the market.

The Challengers

But about 10 years ago, a quiet bunch of IT revolutionaries, tired of expensive, complicated operating systems and the resources needed to support them, created a new breed of network management software and network monitoring systems. Pioneers like Solarwinds, Groundwork, Zoho (Adventnet), Hyperic and others offered 80-90% of the services of the big four at only 20% of the cost. They brought network and systems monitoring to the rest of us.

These companies are faring well, as I write this. For example, Solarwinds, which recently issued an IPO, according to Gartner, has a market capitalization of $1.5 billion, on sales of $93 million.

This is feeding a frenzy of interest by investors and those looking to acquire profit makers – defying the current recession.

Consider recent transactions: Compuware acquired Gomez for $295 million, Hyperic was bought by VMWare and NetQoS was bought by CA for $200 million.

Software Bound

But the challengers and the legacy systems both have one thing in common: their systems are based on software – which requires permanent maintenance efforts. For example, you still have to maintain servers, install setup software, make updates, allocate storage and archive data, setup notification channels, make monitoring failure-proof, and provide remote access.

Consider this metaphor: it’s like being stuck in a train on rails. You can only move in the direction the engineer (in this case the software vendor) is going. And you’re subject to their issues, too, among them multiple code version, legacy codes, long release cycles.

Flying, Rather than Taking the Train

But the development and growth of cloud computing is revolutionizing network management and monitoring services – whether it’s networks, websites, servers, VoIP, etc. It’s like turning in your train ticket for a plane ride.

The cloud changes the whole paradigm of network management and monitoring because it offers:

- multi-tenancy benefits, e.g. a single code base used by multiple customers,

- quick release cycles,

- behavioral analytics,

- customer stay in the loop via frequent communications regarding downtime instances and other stats.

With cloud-based monitoring, customers are happy because there’s quick self-service, sign-up, deployment that takes minutes rather than weeks or months, dependable and constant upgrades to the latest version of software, and there are no maintenance issues or tasks to perform.

Yet, the cloud is not completely surrounded by blue skies. Yes, there are many businesses that are concerned about transferring their internal financial data from their own servers to the cloud. And, there have been recent episodes of cloud outages of consumer applications, such as Google’s email and blog services.

But I ask you… if businesses are comfortable with moving their customer data to the cloud, why would they resist migrating their server’s CPU metrics to the cloud?

Here’s my advice: get off the rails and onto the cloud.

Click the following link to read more information about cloud computing and monitoring services.

The potential benefits to centralized network monitoring are numerous, and they include better end-use productivity, network performance, application performance and security and compliance.

But there are several ways to monitor your networks, each employing different methodologies. And I think it’s important to review them if you’re in the market for such services – so you know what kind of information and services to expect. I’m not saying one method is better than the other, but you may only need to go with one type versus another – depending on your needs. Or, you can pick a combination.

One type of network monitoring is based on Simple Network Management Protocol. SNMP identifies and describes system configurations, monitoring network-attached devices for basic high-level conditions such as outages, total levels (bytes, packets), and number of users. But SNMP-based monitoring uses polling, a system whereby a periodic request is made at variable intervals and the response gives the current state of the system, and it uses up a lot of bandwidth. SNMP-based network monitoring provides a basic level of useful information, but it’s not the best approach for troubleshooting and analysis of root problems.

Then, there’s monitoring via flow records, and this method has become most common in centralized network monitoring. A “flow” is simply a sequence of a sampling of packets that has seven identical characteristics: source IP address, destination IP address, source port, destination port, layer 3 protocol type, type of service (TOS) byte, and input logical interface. Flow records are very analytical, providing information such as overall throughput and statistical data on each IP to IP conversation passing through a network device. Thus flow records provide deeper levels of information needed to troubleshoot network problems. But even this method is limited because it does not include any payload information, and the packets aren’t saved.

The third type of network monitoring is a packet-based approach. With this method, software and/or computer hardware intercept packet traffic passing over a digital network or part of a network. The packets are then decoded and analyzed. Because all packets are captured, this method is 100% accurate for each flow. Compared to the SNMP method, the packet-based approach has a minimal network impact because all analysis is done locally at the point of capture, reducing substantially the bandwidth needed to send information over the network. Also, data in a packet is more comprehensive, so deeper analysis can be performed – which can help IT managers analyze apps, too. The packets are storable, in addition, so that means analysis – and troubleshooting – can begin immediately.

If you’re considering network monitoring, discuss all of these methods with your prospective provider and explore which would be best for you. For instance, if you just want to check the status of a device, SNMP may be all you need. Meanwhile if it’s sampled high-level information you’re after, then flow-based monitoring could be the answer. But if you’re looking for all the detail of network traffic, then packet-based is the approach.

And, perhaps, you may benefit from a combined approach. Read more about centralized network monitoring in this recent article.