The IT professional’s basic mission is to use IT to increase the efficiency of the business. To attain operational efficiency, this means using the same amount of resources but improving service delivery and lowering costs.

The menu of expectations for IT system management reads like this:

1) Simplify and streamline system management through automation;

2) Enable IT to perform proactive system management, heading off potential problems before they result in service degradation;

3) Prioritize system management activities based on business impact;

4) Permit integration of IT processes across IT service management disciplines.

But one very important factor for IT meeting agreed-upon service levels is that strong server and network monitoring is required. In order to be effective and efficient, however, monitoring must be comprehensive and from a centralized perspective. This set-up also allows IT to minimize initial and resolution response times for any and all business critical services.

In the past, companies had to choose between agent or agent-less systems to do really good monitoring. But you have choices now. You can adopt technology that merges the two into a single, hybrid system. Organizations can choose the monitoring system that best fits their needs and budgets.

This latest hybrid monitoring approach provides the vastly granular monitoring presented by agent-based technology where required, combined with the cheaper cost of agent-less technology, where in-depth monitoring is not needed.

Here’s an example: IT can apply agent-based monitoring on crucial ERP and Web servers, and apply lightweight agent-less monitoring for less significant servers and department printers. This provides IT a complete and affordable view of the whole IT environment. The outcome: your IT staff gets operational visibility into all components of the IT landscape – including components not previously monitored.

And to name just one advantage of monitoring from the cloud, this can all be done centrally and comprehensively.

###

San Jose, CA – December 9, 2009 – Monitis, the leading provider of 100% Cloud-based network and systems monitoring solutions, today announced the launch of Website Instant Check, a free service to check website response times from different locations.

This free, simple, easy to use Website Check tool allows IT managers and system administrators to instantly check the availability of their websites and web page-load speeds from multiple locations worldwide outside of their servers’ network. Monitis’ Website Instant Check checks the following functions:

- it sends an HTTP request to your provided URL every 60 seconds from multiple checkpoints around the world.

- it checks Time to First Byte (TTFB), which is the amount of time it takes to deliver the first byte of the requested page to the browser. TTFB represents the confirmation that a website is responding;

- it then checks the full content load speed;

- it then completes the analysis by measuring the DNS resolution time, which measures the translation speed of a domain name into an IP address.

This tool can also be embedded as a widget in user websites and blogs.

According to Hovhannes Avoyan, Monitis’ Founder and CEO, “By helping clients maintain faster web page loads and an ever-improving user experience, the Website Instant Check is yet another in a myriad of small ways that Monitis is helping IT managers and system administrators to keep their companies as profitable and as efficient as possible.” The tool is located at http://portal.monitis.com/web/guest/check-website.

About Monitis All-in-One Monitoring Platform

Monitis is a 100% Cloud-based, complete, and flexible IT monitoring solution which consolidates backend, application, 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.  More than 50,000 customers from small businesses to Fortune 500 companies to government agencies and educational institutions have chosen Monitis to reduce system downtime, improve the productivity of their IT staff, and reduce operational expenditures.

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

Web-wise, it’s a changed world from even a few years ago. The number of online transactions (defined as everything from an exchange of money, to searches, to downloads, etc.) has exploded because companies now use the Web to manage sales, marketing, communications, and product support strategies.

Transactions have also grown via dynamic pages, secure Web sites, integrated search capabilities, and multimedia content. At the same time, transactions have become more complex.

But, as rewarding as they are to business website owners, transactions are also risky – because there’s no guarantee that everything will go 100% smoothly. They can break down anywhere in the process, for example, from sluggish servers or a search engine breakdown.

And when that happens your competitors are never far – just a click or two away.

Fortunately, companies can take a pro-active approach against transaction failure with 24/7 website transaction monitoring. But successful monitoring means capturing all facets of complex online transactions and easily identifying issues that arise.

I recently read an excellent white paper that laid out four key aims of good transaction monitoring. And I’ll go so far as to say that these are principles and characteristics that you should look for in a third-party service. Your monitoring service should:

- Take into consideration the user’s experience. Is your provider taking into account the complexity of a transaction, for example, interconnecting Web communications providers, advertisers and content providers, content distribution networks—all lying behind your company’s firewall? Also, is your monitoring service getting a comprehensive look at user experiences across the globe (that’s why they call it the World Wide Web!). There are going to be differences because there are variances in access speeds and networking technologies. That’s why it’s crucial to pick a cloud-based provider, which can monitor transaction performance from anywhere users live.

- Monitor the entire transaction. Ask your provider if they can monitor a transaction across its entire life span, for example, clicking through multiple pages. And, if a problem should occur, can they tell you – with details – at what point the failure happened?

- Make it simple. Is your monitoring service making it easy for you, or is it giving you or your IT department more to do? Your service should be able to do all the heavy lifting and give you the information you need to know in easy-to-figure out reports.

- Be reliable. Your solution should give you the following information: whether a problem exists, where it exists, and whether it’s something that needs your resources to fix. Also, you should have enough confidence in the service to know that its monitoring metrics reflect real problems and not because the service itself is faulty.

To make sure your online business or organization is handling transactions successfully, you need to be on guard around the clock and be vigilant in looking for problems. Luckily, with today’s cloud infrastructure intact, you can find really good monitoring services that can do this job for you – hassle-free.

For more information on cloud-based transaction monitoring, check out Monitis.

Press release

San Jose, CA – December 7, 2009 – Monitis, the leading provider of 100% Cloud-based network, server and application monitoring software as a service (SaaS), today announced yet another world-first: the ability for IT managers to create custom, end-to-end server monitoring locations for within the Monitis system.

The traditional Monitis offering has always included the ability to monitor servers’ availability and performance end-to-end from eight different geographic locations: US-East, US-West (recently added), US-Center, UK, Germany, China, Australia, and Central America.

With Monitis’ new Custom Server Monitoring Locations tool, IT managers and system administrators can now define for themselves where they want to monitor from. This ability to have monitoring that is highly geographically customizable is a tremendous asset for websites wanting to monitor and improve their load-time performance in targeted markets.

As with all Monitis products, set-up is easy and quick. Simply install a small internal agent, define an unlimited number of locations to monitor from, and you are off and running.

Hovhannes Avoyan, Monitis’ Founder and CEO, commented, “Custom Server Monitoring Locations is a simple idea, but one that will give an enormous about of power to IT managers. It’s another of the numerous ways that Monitis is changing the servers and network monitoring game.”

About Monitis All-in-One Monitoring Platform

Monitis (http://www.monitis.com) is a 100% Cloud-based, complete, and flexible IT monitoring solution which consolidates backend, application, 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.  More than 50,000 customers from small businesses to Fortune 500 companies to government agencies and educational institutions have chosen Monitis to reduce system downtime, improve the productivity of their IT staff, and reduce operational expenditures.

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 12%.

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

Remember the image of the Ma Bell telephone operator, red nails, lipstick and counting the minutes until her next cigarette break, sitting on a stool, amid a line of fellow operators, plugging cables into a main switch board to connect a caller in New York with somebody in California?

Well, you might say that that old image is akin to today’s Domain Name System, or DNS. The tech is what ISPs use to convert easy-to-remember domain names — into the unique Internet Protocol (IP) numbers — that computers use to communicate with one another.

Well, now Google is carrying on the tradition of the old switchboard – and for the cloud. Google recently launched its own public DNS resolver called Google Public DNS. Its goal: to make web computing faster for its legions of search engine, homepage, email and cloud app users.

On its blog, Google explained: The average Internet user ends up performing hundreds of DNS lookups each day, and some complex pages require multiple DNS lookups before they start loading. “This can slow down the browsing experience.”

Google knows that speed, among other things like reliability and security, matter to Internet users. The company is providing detailed instructions to the web-savvy on how to set up Google Public DNS on their computers – that is, those comfortable enough to make the switch (Hey, isn’t this a microcosm of the whole issue of moving apps and databases on the cloud?).

Google plans to share users’ experiences with the broader web community and other DNS providers. And it says the DNS will “benefit users worldwide while also helping the tens of thousands of DNS resolvers improve their services, ultimately making the web faster for everyone.”

I welcome this news – which I think will make cloud computing and service providers, like monitoring services, faster, more reliable and, ultimately, more appealing to businesses!

Here’s an interesting term for you: ‘democratization of technology.’

I read this in a story about SolarWinds, a Texas company with a line of Windows-based network management products. Apparently, the company employs a development model that relies heavily on user input – a 30,000-member-strong online community that comments and helps shape its products.

SolarWinds has “democratized the process for frontline network managers to be deeply involved in shaping products, as well as having a voice in industry issues,” the story said.

Specifically, the company offers downloadable software, including software for comprehensive fault and network performance management, providing visibility into the health of network devices, servers, and applications. One of its products also focuses on network configuration and change management.

But what I thought was noteworthy here was the company’s online community — also a place that customers can go to find information, including tips from SolarWinds company experts. They can find peer support, too, and perspectives on all of SolarWinds’ products.

Nice work, SolarWinds! This concept of intense user involvement is extremely valuable in today’s IT environment. Users are, well, used to instantaneous results, and they expect their voices to be heard. Regardless of the web service, provider tools such as blogs, chat rooms, 24/7-staffed help lines are the norm, or, at least, that’s what customers expect.

And we’ve long recognized this at Monitis. That’s why we keep a “live chat” toll-free number employed (1-800-657-7949) – so that we can hear what our customers think and have to say about our cloud-based monitoring service.

And I have to say, so far we’ve received some very valuable feedback. And like SolarWinds, we’ve put that directly into product development.

With IT – just like other corporate departments – under the gun from senior management to centralize and reap economies of scale, distributed systems seem the dream answer to cost-cutting directives from above. To be sum it all up, distributed systems offer an attractive solution – centralized control along with dispersed physical assets and overhead.

In a recent article I read, the author put it just right: “The relentlessly increasing cost and complexity of maintaining IT departments and infrastructure makes on-tap computing power very attractive to modern enterprises.”

But beyond this simple cost-efficiency based explanation of the benefits of cloud computing for businesses, here are five reasons to make the switch:

- Scalability: PaaS is the end goal of businesses moving to the cloud. It’s the idea that a platform – hosting SaaS apps, can itself be run as a service. Consumers already use the cloud in a SaaS environment. SaaS applications running on a PaaS are easy to deploy, just the opposite of the complex and difficult environment at most companies today – where companies exhaust resources and manpower deploying, maintaining, and upgrading software systems “using skills way outside their businesses’ core function of interest simply because the resulting application is indispensable,” says the story. How true! Over a grid, the power of existing systems can be scaled exponentially, maintained seamlessly, upgraded transparently, and redeployed at will.

- Speed: Grid-powered PaaS and their apps can help increase productivity and a business’s competitiveness with fast deployment of new systems or the speedy ramping up existing ones. In addition, users can tap SaaS apps the run on grid-based PaaSs from anywhere globally…fast and without any special training.

- Deployment: Developers can pare weeks off integration and configuration time with hosting environments for their cloud platforms. On-demand network computing power and storage capability means that companies don’t have to invest the bank and everything under the mattress in static hardware.

- Cost: As I said above, this is one of the biggest advantages for companies making the move to the cloud. Why? “Grids pull across projects to provide more predictability at less cost with fewer software licenses, ” says the story. On top of that, PaaS, combined with SaaS, allows businesses to pay only for the resources they actually use. And don’t’ forget about the savings from not investing in expensive hardware!

PaaS, distributed computing infrastructure and virtualization are working together to create powerful and fast networks. It’s the imaginative and powerful apps, managed services, such as network, server and transaction monitoring, and end-user apps that will complete the picture to bring about a true cloud revolution.

More good news for cloud computing! Google last week released its once mysterious Chrome Operating System to open source.

Chrome OS, available in 2010 – is a web-based operating system that promises to boot up super-fast on a netbook – way faster than the time it takes to start your basic PC. And Chrome has web applications (competing with Microsoft Windows Azure) that will run on application tabs. Users can access with one click and manage in a series of windows.

I read a short piece in which Matt Papakipos, engineering director for Chrome OS, addressed security issues (always reassuring to businesses considering making the leap to the cloud). In the story, he is quoted as saying that every component of Chrome OS, from firmware, to the kernel, to the file, has a cryptographic signature attached to them. “It’s as if each one were a document that’s signed at the bottom with a John Hancock saying ‘Yes, this is the right set of bits,” he said.

It’s clear (to me, anyway, and I hope to a growing number of you all) that we’re rapidly moving away from complicated, resource-hungry office desktops to lighter, app-free machines – leaving the heavy-lifting such as app access and data storage to the cloud.

One more step in the right direction!

PS: If you want to catch the scoop on Google’s vision for the future of cloud computing, check out this YouTube video.

Did you know that nearly half of companies these days are reducing or deferring budgets for IT security, despite growing instances of web incursions into databases and other private information? That’s according to a 2009 study by PriceWaterhouse Coopers.

I came across that number while reading a story about in Wired that reports on a Senate panel’s finding that 80% of cyber attacks can be prevented. According to the Richard Schaeffer, information assurance director for the National Security Administration (NSA), who testified before the Senate Judiciary Subcommittee on Terrorism, Technology and Homeland Security, If network administrators simply instituted proper configuration policies and conducted good network monitoring most attacks would be prevented.

Larry Clinton, president of the Internet Security Alliance, a group that represents banks, telecoms, defense and technology companies and other industries that rely on the internet, told the panel that much of the fault is with companies and governments who collect and store data. He said that “they do not understand themselves to be responsible for the defense of the data. “The marketing department has data, the finance department has data, etc, but they think the security of the data is the responsibility of the IT guys at the end of the hall.”

Others, like Philip Reitinger, director of the National Cyber Security Center at the Department of Homeland Security, a former Microsoft executive, said that end-users need to be made aware of the simple things they can do to protect themselves — such as keeping software and anti-virus up to date.

I’m in total agreement here.

Companies who do business on the web but want to improve their security have a simple solution at hand: invest in monitoring of data and transactions. The service they choose should provide frequent monitoring of websites, email servers, firewalls, VoIP, databases, domain name servers, routers, web servers, and it should offer several different ways of reporting on incursion attempts, for example, via SMS or Twitter. To stay on guard round-the-clock, the vendor should be able to do it from the cloud – from anywhere in the world.

For more information on the state of cyber security, read the full article here.

When people talk about businesses using the cloud, we often think of companies in the classic sense – some global, private enterprise or even a mid-sized company deciding to re-apply resources and save by switching data storage and apps virtually.

But all kinds of organizations are benefiting by using cloud applications. Take schools and universities, for one.

There are many wonderful and productivity-enhancing applications that academic institutions use on the cloud to manage all facets of administration. For example, there’s Blackboard, which offers software to help schools manage courses, process transactions and e-commerce as well as oversee online communities. Another course management system housed on the cloud is the open-source Moodle program – also used by many schools and universities around the world.

But, as I’ve said many times before in this blog (it’s always worth repeating, though), cloud computing is great – but even better when you can employ cloud-based services, such as monitoring, to ensure security and a solid, safe and satisfying user experience.

There’s a lot that could go wrong, and thus a lot that needs monitoring! Internet business processes such as shopping carts, forms, internal search engines and logins all rely on servers and web applications. If a failure occurs, your customers can’t continue the order process, and they won’t be able to use your application. Those customers, visitors and users will go elsewhere, and as a result, you’ll lose revenue and repeat visits.  And that means a loss of future business, too.

To keep things running smoothly, you need a service to continually monitor your transactions and alert you when any of the various steps in a transaction don’t work correctly. Thus, you increase revenue and enhance your reputation for quality and performance online.

One mark of a good monitoring service is its ability to simulate real customers, visitors and users and monitor from within the browser. So, monitoring is performed from the same perspective as that of the end-user.

Since this is the business I’m in, you might be a bit skeptical at the advice I’m offering. But if you don’t want to take my word for it, listen to Jeff Paul Solomon, systems administrator at Loyola Marymount University, who employed Monitis to monitor its course-management system:

“We had just brought up a highly-visible, web-based application.  We could monitor the servers, but really needed a way to monitor user-experience – not just verifying that the web page was up, or even if the user could log in, but how long it took and what the user could see on subsequent pages.  We found Monitis, which gave us fantastic transaction monitor features, and allowed us to tune our application and be notified before users started to call.  The support we received was unbelievable, great and responsive.  I would definitely recommend Monitis.”

Bottom line: you don’t want frustrated website customers or end-users of your cloud-based app calling to report a problem that you’re unaware of – all the while losing money and prestige. Back up your business or system with monitoring services and avoid potential troubles.

Read other testimonials about how cloud-based monitoring is working for all kinds of organizations!