For IT professionals, sleep loss from worrying about what can go wrong in the night back at the data center can be a major problem.

And a new survey of more than 350 network and system administrators in the U.S. that I read about reveals the #1 cause: nearly four in 10 attributed their insomnia to worries about a breach of network security.

An additional 38% worried about risky user activity. Meanwhile, recovery plans or the lack of them, kept 32% up at night.

Compared to the survey taken in 2009, employee use of social media emerged as a major concern. Again, four in 10 are highly concerned, and amongst them, 22% are “moderately concerned,” while 18% are “extremely concerned.”

It’s interesting that at least 40% are worried about both social media use and security breaches, and the research company took note, too. “Of course, there are many possible reasons for worrying about a breach to a network, and we are not saying that there is necessarily a primary causal relationship between employee use of social media and network breaches,” said Steve Birnkrant, CEO at Amplitude Research, who was quoted in the story I read. “But the results do indicate a statistically significant relationship between how concerned network administrators are about employee use of social media and how worried they are about a security breach to their network.”

It’s a real shame that IT folks actually lose sleep over worrying about what can go “bump” in the night. But it doesn’t have to be that way. I’ll never forget one client telling me that he got the most comfortable sleep in years shortly after he began 24/7 monitoring of his servers and networks with Monitis.

What’s so comforting about it? Well, if something did go wrong, instead of finding out about it the next morning (when it could already be too late to address the problem), Monitis sends notifications that allow administrators to fix the problem right away. Monitis employs the following notifications:

• Live-voice: we’ll call you at the phone number of your choice anytime, day or night
• Email: we can send unlimited emails, as well as weekly and daily SLA and performance reports.
• SMS (short messages)
• IM (instant messengers, including ICQ, Google Talk)
• Twitter

Well, you may be asking, what if my network is down? How can monitoring proceed?

With some monitoring agencies, for example, Open Source Nagios, Cacti, Zabbix, Zenos  or commercial Solarwinds, or Whatsup Gold, that may be a problem. You have a good chance of missing a critical alert if your network, monitoring server, mail server, SMS, firewall or router is down.

But because Monitis operates from the cloud and its server isn’t deployed on your local network, the technology will notify you even if your network is not functioning. Monitis checks (and from multiple locations) whether:

• your internal monitoring agents are alive and responding,
• remotely, if web services are accessible

Read more here on the blanket coverage Monitis provides to help you get a good night’s sleep!

At CloudConnect, the conference about all things cloud in California this past week, there was some good advice dispensed on what would be suitable for the cloud and what wouldn’t.

Let’s discuss some arguments overheard:

30 percent of discretionary IT spending, Saugatuck forecasts that up to 20 percent of that will go to cloud computing in the next 12 to 24 months- contracting with a cloud provider for a “pay-as-you-go” computing infrastructure could be great for a small to medium-sized company, but a huge enterprise has to factor in the cost of business disruption. The costs of disruption could be as high as loss of 30% savings, according to Bill McNee, founder and CEO of Saugatuck Technology, an IT research firm. McNee’s firm specializes in assisting large enterprises.

Whether you’re suited for the cloud depends on the types of applications you want to use, too. For example, collaboration apps may be ideal, but not necessarily apps that operate on-premise with very little utilization variability, said McNee.

On the other hand, Microsoft’s senior director of business strategy for Window’s Azure, Dianne O’Brien, says that deciding which applications you put on the cloud depends on how they “behave,” according to the story I read about the conference. O’Brien says there are four types of apps suitable for the cloud:

- those that you use only sporadically each day, for example, end-of-day batch processing for a web retailer;

- those quick-growing apps, for example, popular social networking tools;

- those with unpredictable spikes in usage;

- apps with predictable spikes in usage, such as an online retailer during Black Friday.

Actually, if you want to check out how your apps would fare on the cloud, Microsoft has a TCO/ROI calculator on its Web site.

Others at the conference argued that calculating ROI in terms of cost savings was too narrow. Perhaps the more important factor is agility of capacity – the ability to adjust capacity levels at the most crucial times.

To help track those times when your share of visitors spike – and thus extra capacity is needed – it’s important to have a monitoring system in place that operates virtually, 24/7 and has multiple ways to warn you.

Cloud computing and virtualization are presenting IT managers with greater challenges than ever before. For one, things are far more dynamic and complex these days – for example, with virtualized and multi-vendor data center environments and composite apps to look after.

Enterprises are increasingly in need of easy-to-use and integrated IT management solutions. I know that on the monitoring side of things, I see this increasing demand on a daily basis. For companies that are cloud computing, as well as for those who are operating virtualized networks, it’s simply not enough anymore to use limited tools that manage things on a piecemeal basis. What’s needed are tools that work across all environments…virtual, internal server-based and those on the cloud.

That’s one reason why you’ll keep seeing IT management software companies needing to issue upgrades to their products. For example, SolarWinds has just introduced the latest release of its enterprise network management solution — SolarWinds Orion Network Performance Monitor (NPM). The new version, #10, according to a press release I read, includes new modules for companies to enhance control and visibility across the entire IT infrastructure.

Pricing for the new version starts at $2,475 per 100 elements (the largest number of network devices or interfaces). Yes, that’s right — $2,475!

This is what makes cloud-based performance monitoring so beautiful. Because monitoring is done from the cloud in a Software as a Service (SaaS) model, the solution is continuously and automatically updated with new features, relieving IT staff of the tedious job of upgrading…and paying dearly for those upgrades, too.

There are multiple pricing options for monitoring starting from a few dollars/month. And, in addition, cloud-based monitoring, such as the service offered by Monitis, also allows IT pros to pay as they go. So, if you don’t fully utilize all the elements of monitoring, you don’t have to pay for it.

When you’re making choices for IT management solutions, weigh all the factors for performance monitoring tools that are part of the package.

It seems as if colleges and universities are better equipped to deal with emergencies these days, according to a survey that I read. And while this wasn’t in the survey, I can tell you just from conversations I have daily with schools around the globe that more and more are opting for notification systems to alert them of problems with their computing needs, too.

The Campus Computing Survey, which polled more than 500 U.S. higher educational institutions across the country, reveals that only about 5% do not have an “operational emergency notification system,” down from about one-quarter who didn’t have such a system in 2007.

“These dramatic gains reflect significant institutional concern about notification capacity,” says Kenneth C. Green, founding director of The Campus Computing Project, in a release about the poll. “Given recent campus tragedies and natural disasters, campus officials have come to recognize that technology is an essential component of a comprehensive institutional crisis management strategy.”

While the overall gain in notification tools was significant, the numbers were even more dramatic surrounding which type of notification technology that schools are using. For example, in the survey, the proportion of campuses reporting sirens as part of their plans jumped from 23.4% in 2007 to 34.8% in 2008. Similarly, 86.6% of campuses now have notification capacity utilizing email – up from a bit more than two-thirds in the previous survey. Meanwhile, voice mail to campus phones rose almost by half to 65.5%, from 44.6% in 2007. Text messaging grew, too, from 43.3% in 2007 to 75.6% now.

Another indicator: the percentage of campuses reporting voice mail notification to off-campus phones and cell phones more than doubled from 2007 (from18% to just over 41% for “wired” phones and from 22.5% to 48.5% for mobile phones).

Other survey data revealed that more schools are considering adopting student email services.

Two-fifths (42.4%) of institutions say they’ve switched or are about to switch to an outsourced student email service, while nearly three in 10 (28.3%) are weighing options for outsourcing student email during the current academic year. In contrast, just 14.8% of schools now have outsourced email services for faculty.

No surprise here. The majority of campuses (more than 56%) with outsourced student email are using Google’s Gmail, and two-fifths (38.4%t) are using Microsoft. Another 4.8% are using the open-source tool Zimbra.

Just as schools are using tools to alert students of emergencies, such as shutdowns from snowstorms, cloud-based monitoring systems are using phones, email, texting, instant messaging, Twitter and other alerts to let IT folks at educational institutions know about outages, denial of service and other slow app performance. Schools, like businesses, want to know when troubling circumstances are on the horizon – whether it’s with a server, network or cloud provider – and they want to rely on tools to quickly communicate the situation to IT pros so they can head off the problem or fix it fast!

I forecast a continuing trend in the need and desire for alert systems from organizations – both for computing and dealing with emergencies.

This week we rolled out a couple new updates to the Monitis dashboard.

When you’re monitoring more than 20 or 30 services you need a good way to view them in one place.  That’s what the newly improved Monitis Snapshot views are for.  Let’s take a look at the External and URL Snapshots.

Each row is now click-able, so when you click a URL a more detailed view of that monitor will appear.   You can have multiple External Snapshots on different tabs, each set with a different tag-name.  In the URL Snapshot you can view your most critical URLs (the ones with the slowest response time) or just the top 10, 20, or 30.  Each column in these tables can be sorted, so you can quickly rank by response time or by URL alphabetically.

Internal Snapshots are similar.

The Windows Agents Snapshot shows a list of your Windows servers being monitored and their basic performance metrics.  The CPU, Memory, Drive, and Load Snapshots show the servers that require the most urgent attention.  Using tag-names and the sorting feature, monitoring even hundreds of servers becomes possible.

We also added the Full Page Monitor this week.  It is essentially an advanced external monitor.  It not only shows the response time of a webpage, but also the HTTP response code, total download time, DNS and Connection time, time to the first and last byte, and the total size of objects (js, css, images, external scripts, flash) in the webpage.  This is a great way to identify bottlenecks to your webpages.  Remember, research shows that it only takes a couple seconds before your visitors give up on your site.

To try it out, go to Add Monitor>Full Page and fill in the necessary fields.  Then click Add.


This test loads Yahoo every 5 minutes.  Click the dot and a window containing the individual objects and a table will pop up.

It’s that easy.  And Full Page Monitors start at only $5/location/month for a 20 minute interval, so you can monitor all your webpages without breaking your wallet. More features coming soon, so stay tuned!

On Wednesday the 12th of May, I’ll be taking an hour or so to listen in on a webinar about how one very large university migrated a key application to the cloud. I’m anxious (in a good way) to hear the details behind how Vanderbilt University, which is located in New York City, replaced its open-source student email system with Google Apps Education Edition.

The University required that the new system it chose handle the following:

- Work and communicate collaboratively

- Be more technically savvy and sophisticated

- Act as a search engine with the capability of handling almost 300,000 searches per month

- Handle 4 million documents

In deciding to go to the cloud, Vanderbilt carefully weighed its options and considered the ratings of third-party analysts for different systems. However, it chose Google Apps Education Edition – a free version of Google Apps that’s built especially for educational institutions. After only a month, Vanderbilt had the new system up and running and undergrads were using the new email and collaboration tools.

In addition, the benefits to the school included:

• savings of nearly $1 million in storage costs, and it avoided spending money on additional servers
• more time for IT pros to fix legacy data problems and focus their attention on more strategic projects
• an improved end-user experience via the new, advanced search functionality.

In this blog, I’ve written about how the cloud is changing school management and education via SaaS solutions like Blackboard and Moodle, but it’s clear that the educational world is, like many other industries, exploring cloud apps to improve communication and administrative productivity.

That, of course, means new opportunities and benefits for schools, such as mentioned above for Vanderbilt, but it also means increased risk, for example, the kind of risk that comes with putting data on the cloud and entrusting such an important app such as email in others’ hands. That’s why so many schools are turning to independent monitoring tools to ensure their new cloud platforms are:

• #1 – up and running
• #2 – making apps available for everyone to use when they want them.

If you want to find out more about how Vanderbilt U. successfully made the switch to the cloud, why not check out the webinar ?

International Data Corp. (IDC) today released a new forecast in a report that seems to predict the rosiest future for cloud spending I’ve seen yet.

The company forecasts that server sales related to cloud computing will jump to $12.6 billion in the next five years as more businesses embrace automated and virtualized data centers.

Both public and private clouds will benefit by growth, according to IDC. Server revenue for public- sector cloud computing, such as for local, regional and national governments, will rise to $718 million in 2014 from $582 million last year. Meanwhile, server revenue for the private-sector cloud market is forecast to jump to $11.8 billion from $7.3 billion over the same period.

“Now is a great time for many IT organizations to begin seriously considering this technology and employing public and private clouds in order to simplify sprawling IT environments,” IDC analyst Katherine Broderick said in a statement, in the report.

Not mentioned in The Wall Street Journal article where I read about the new predictions is the impact on the business world of the growth in cloud services. As more companies and organizations make the switch to both public and private clouds, they’re adding cloud-ready apps that help improve productivity and reduce labor and administrative costs.

For instance, more and more companies are employing cloud-based monitoring as a way to ensure that they get an independent and fair review of key metrics, like uptime and outages on their cloud platforms. I’m not saying that cloud providers purposely mislead customers or give them false performance data reports, but an independent watchdog is more apt to consider each instance with more rigor and impartiality.

Time. It flies. Don’t waste it. It’s money.

We all know these platitudes about the value of time and that we should be good stewards of our minutes and hours, but in the IT world, it’s pretty difficult to keep ahead of the clock.

And when it comes to the monitoring of networks, systems and websites, IT pros must often remain stuck on-site monitoring mundane and semi-automated processes that seem to take forever. Because most monitoring solutions are software-based, they require IT staff to be present – sometimes even when it’s time to go to bed.

I know this first-hand; I used to be one of them when I worked for Lycos/Europe. Missed many a dance recital for my kids, and got lots of complaints from my wife.

Now, Monitis has published a new whitepaper that outlines how cloud-based monitoring can free IT staff from both the mundane and wasteful. The paper, “Liberating Time, How Cloud-based Monitoring is Transforming IT Manager Productivity,” shows how Monitis “transformed the market by being the first monitoring company to fully integrate systems, network, and website monitoring into an all-in-one, comprehensive suite of tools that is available entirely from the Cloud.” As a result, IT managers are now free to monitor anything from anywhere, and are no longer stuck in the office.

Unlike other monitoring systems, which requiring IT managers to purchase and stitch together a variety of software-based tools that can take weeks or months to install and require regular updates (ugh!), the Monitis solution is an all-in-one, integrated suite of tools. What that means is that you don’t need to worry about how your tools play with others, because the solution is built to house as much or as little as you need.

The advantages of an all-in-one, customizable suite of tools include:

External Services Monitoring Tools – for monitoring websites, fileservers, mail servers, VoIP, and databases from the end-user’s point of view.

Server Monitoring Tools – which monitors all aspects of your CPU, memory, processes, and storage, and can be done on Linux, Windows, FreeBSD, and Solaris.

Network Monitoring Tools– a comprehensive suite of SNMP, ping, http, ssh, and network discovery tools.

Transaction Monitoring Tools – a scenario-based suite of tools able to track multi-step applications through real web browsers (e.g IE or Firefox). Behavioral scripts (or paths) are created to simulate an action or path that a customer or end-user would take on a site and ensure that e-commerce sites do what they are meant to do – make you money.

Cloud Monitoring Tools – which monitor instances, automation, usages and give you third-party verification of your SLA with Amazon (EC2, S3), Rackspace, GoGrid, or any other Cloud provider.

Web-Traffic Monitoring Tools – which offer in-depth insight into where your visitors are coming from, where they are going to, and how they got there.

Application Monitoring Tools – which enables monitoring of any Java-based service with JMX hooks – and from the Cloud. This means that users, in addition to monitoring, troubleshooting, diagnosing root causes, and pro-actively planning inside a production Java (also JRuby) application that’s deployed in a cloud or in a datacenter, can monitor these processes from anywhere at any time.

The best thing about all these features is that their automated and they free up IT managers from their endless list of manual tasks. No more sleepless nights and complaining spouses. Look for more about the advantages of cloud monitoring in my next post. I’ll run through how it can specifically save IT staff time and your company money. Need more facts? Please read a recent Monitis review at Google Apps Marketplace by Danny O.:

“Before finding Monitis I was using a couple open source tools including Nagios and grew frustrated with two things: 1. It wasn’t scalable enough to monitor our 300+websites, and 2. Required hours of configuration.
With Monitis, within a half hour of signing up we were able to monitor all our websites as well as 15 servers and a web-based application. It’s a one of a kind service and I highly recommend it to anyone. ”

New numbers are in, and they show that companies and organizations are taking to virtualization the way green does to grass.

A survey of 150 IT and networking pros at Interop 2010 in Las Vegas, conducted by the Merritt Group, reveals that virtualization is being used in branch offices and data centers alike and that companies prefer industry-standard servers versus proprietary networking appliances or routers to make their virtualized services and apps run.

Here’s what the study, sponsored by a company that specializes in application delivery networking, says:

• 59% use virtualization tech in their branch offices;
• More than three-quarters (76%) have deployed virtualization in their data centers;
• 44% not currently using virtualization in their branch offices plan to deploy it this year, while 81% of those already deploying virtualization in satellite offices plan to extend their plans this year.
• 82% prefer industry standard servers as the platform of choice for virtualized services and applications in the branch office.

Deployment of virtualization has come a long way, as this latest survey proves. Yet you should be choosy about what kind of apps you put into virtual capacity because it’s not road-tested as much as a company’s own data centers and networks.

However, if you do decide to take advantage of cloud resources, it’s comforting to know that there are services such as data and network monitoring, all done from the cloud, which will alert you to potential security breaches or failures.

I was pleased to learn that Google has plunked down nearly $40 million in investments in two North Dakota wind farms. It is the Internet and cloud app giant’s first direct investment in utility-scale, renewable-energy generation, according to The Wall Street Journal.

Up until now, Google has been making investments in start-up or early stage companies working on wind, solar and geo-thermal technologies for power sources. But now, the company said it’s turning its focus to investing directly in projects that use the most modern methods in clean energy. The wind turbines that Google partially owns generate nearly 170 megawatts of power, energy that could take care of the needs of more than 55,000 homes.

The news of Google’s investment is welcome to those, including me, who believe that cloud computing is not only less costly for enterprises, but also gentler on the earth. Of course, how gentle depends on where cloud providers derive their energy sources: coal plants or wind farms?

Unfortunately, for environmentally conscious users of Gmail and Google Docs, the electricity generated from the wind farms that Google has invested in, won’t power its data centers, says the article. But it’s great to know that Google’s investment policies in alternative energy sources are changing and that it’s stepping up its interest in deploying renewable energy.

What’s my interest in clean computing? Well, at Monitis, we’ve figured out how monitoring via the cloud is vastly cheaper, greener than through traditional models, such as open-source software. And as we continue to grow to meet higher demands for the Cloud monitoring, it not only makes us feel good knowing that using cloud-based tools is less costly for customers, but that it’s also gentler on the earth.