San Jose, CA – July 26, 2010 – Having already been the first monitoring dashboard provider to switch from Flash to open-source HTML5, Monitis, the leading provider of the world’s first Cloud-based network and application monitoring suite, today announced another revolutionary advance in its technology. Now Monitis Mobile(available at m.monitis.com) will also switch from static images to HTML5, enabling phones running on iPhone OS, Android, and Symbian to run open-source HTML5-based charts instead of the Google charts as images that Monitis Mobile had previously used.

Given increasing concern surrounding the problems with Flash (battery drain, not open-source, and security vulnerabilities), Monitis was the first monitoring provider to preemptively replace Flash with open-source HTML5 on its core product. Hence, the move to open-source HTML5 on Monitis Mobile was only a matter of time.

With the new open-source HTML5 charts will load much faster and contain more interactive features. These new charts will be based on open-source Flot, a pure Javascript plotting library for iQuery.

Said CEO Hovhannes Avoyan, “We’ve done it again. With the advent of open-source HTML5-based Monitis Mobile, we’ve once more changed the game in the category. No other monitoring company is innovating as quickly as Monitis at the moment. We are indeed the ones to watch.”

About Monitis All-in-One Monitoring Platform

Monitis is the only service that provides Systems 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 back-end monitoring, application monitoring, website monitoring, and cloud monitoring in an all-in-one, hosted 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. These accolades include:

• Being named as the “Most Innovative Start-Up for 2009″ by industry analyst The 451 Group at their annual client conference in December 2009.
  
• Being ranked among the 2010 OnDemand 100 in April 2010. The OnDemand 100 is a ranking by Morgan Stanley, KPMG, and AlwaysOn of the world’s top 100 private companies.
  

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 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
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2880 Zanker Road Suite 203
San Jose, CA-95134
USA

Came across some interesting data from Google on the size, number of resources and other metrics of pages on the web. I thought they were worth noting here because some of the stats indicate that webmasters out there are only taking advantage of some of the power of the web, and in the process limiting themselves and the companies they represent — a lot of times their own.

This stuff comes from Googlebot — the company’s crawl and indexing pipeline. (Googlebot not only processes the main HTML of a page, but also all embedded resources such as images, scripts and stylesheets.)

• The average web page takes up 320 KB on the wire;
• Only two-thirds of the compressible material on a page is actually compressed.
• In 80% of pages, 10 or more resources are loaded from a single host.
• The most popular sites could eliminate more than 8 HTTP requests per page if they combined all scripts on the same host into one and all stylesheets on the same host into one.

Also, this:

• The mean number of hosts per page is 7 for all sites Googlebot looks at, while the median is 5 and the max is an incredible 374
• Mean KB per page is just over 320 for all sites, while the median is about 177.5 and the max is just over 517,026
• The mean KB per host is 45.69; the median is more than 13 and the max is 441,631.71

Do you want your website to run faster? The first step is to make sure you’re monitoring your site. Consider trying Mon.itor.us is a free, powerful website, server and traffic monitoring service. We have established track records of robust execution, alerts delivery and we help many website owners to reach high uptime and availability at no cost. Mon.itor.us is a part of the Monitis family, which provides professional, premium all-in-one monitoring service, integrating application performance with back-end infrastructure and cloud monitoring.

Mon.itor.us provides a fresh, novel approach to web and systems monitoring.

What's Your Favorite Cloud Flavor?

Just as there’s vanilla and chocolate and other ice cream flavors that different people gravitate towards, there are four favorite flavors today to cloud computing, according to an article I just read on IT World. A lot of this I’ve heard already, and certainly seen already among my Monitis monitoring services client base.

One is internal or private clouds — which allow a company to use virtualization and management software to tie together servers, storage, networks data and apps. The end goal is to allow companies to shift storage, computing power or other resources invisibly from one place to another to give all end users in an enterprise all the resources they need — but no more than that.   And private clouds should also give companies a lot of management automation and let business units charge back for services used.

Another favorite flavor is an external cloud — the kind that many small and mid-sized businesses gravitate to because it is cost effective, eliminates the need for IT proficiency, but unfortunately is also the kind that is worried about by a lot of folks for security reasons. Goodness knows there’s been plenty of evidence that they’re not perfect and are subject to service denials and database invasions (the whole Google China incident).  By the way, the article quotes recent Portio Research that says 68% of respondents are worried about security enough to hold them back from starting cloud projects.

Then there’s the Hybrid approach to cloud computing — a mix of internal clouds, external cloud services and traditional SaaS options. This is the flavor most companies relish, and it’s the near future of cloud computing, says the article. Smaller-scale workspace on demand services, for instance those offered by CloudShare, Soonr or Microsoft Azure, often work.

SaaS is the fourth flavor, and apparently the vanilla of the group, according to the article. “For those looking for an even smaller slice of additional functionality or capacity, plain-jane SaaS may be the way to go,” says the piece. “The quickest way to get into cloud computing is to sign up for free email at Yahoo or Google, or for productivity apps from Zoho, 37Signals or a host of other services aimed at businesses or individuals.”

Whatever flavor of the cloud your company leans toward, there are opportunities for every type of enterprise. And considering the options out there, I can’t think of any wiser strategy than to employ monitoring of cloud apps and cloud platforms as a complement to employing clouds.

It seems that the world of academia is coming up with a new way for cloud platforms — which offer individual computer users and companies access to powerful computers and software applications hosted by remote groups of servers — a kind of early warning system that can predict bottlenecks that slow operating speed and then address them before they become a major problem for businesses.

The research comes from the University of North Carolina.

“Previously, something bad would happen and you’d be left trying to figure out what took place. Often, you’d be unable to recreate the exact conditions that created the problem,” says Dr. Xiaohui (Helen) Gu, an assistant professor of computer science and co-author of a paper describing the new research, in an article I read recently. “However, if you can predict an anomaly, you are able to track the exact conditions that are leading up to a problem, diagnose what is wrong and put corrective actions into place much more quickly.”

The list of things that can go wrong and interfere with smooth operation of hosting services, cloud computing and data centers is long. Just a few: shrinking user capacity and host failures — resulting in violations of service agreements, financial penalties, even loss of clientIs.

In order to be on target predicting abnormalities, UNC researchers created a series of models that examine system activity in a variety of different contexts. In other words, the models are able to determine what constitutes normal behavior under a lot of different circumstances. Since the models do a good job of defining normal behavior, they are able to pretty accurately identify abnormal behavior, said the article.

Monitis's Web Load Testing: How it Works

Gee, this sounds an awful lot like what we at Monitis do for customers of cloud services providers, and it’s called Web Load Tester. With this service we help companies ensure their sites web pages continue to work as designed when more visitors than expected to show up and buy your products. Heavy user traffic is never a bad thing, unless your web system is under too much stress.  Web LoadTester helps you determine how your system responds to that traffic.  The service is available 24/7 to ensure your websites and applications are ready for any number of visitors whenever they arrive.

Glad to see UNC and Monitis are in sync working on ensuring smooth running of cloud services, even if our efforts are for different sets of audiences.

Seems to me there’s a lot of movement toward a broader, stronger cloud infrastructure these days in all parts of the world, but I’m particularly struck by the activity in Asia. For example, last year we responded to rising customer demand for monitoring services in China by opening a monitoring station there.

Yamamoto Dreams About the Cloud

Now comes word that Fujitsu, that Japanese electronics giant, is “pinning its future” on cloud computing services, says the Wall Street Journal – that is, to lead its long-term earnings and overseas expansion.  Masami Yamamoto, the president of Fujitsu, said that he expects cloud computing-related businesses to generate revenue of about Y1.3 trillion to Y1.5 trillion in the fiscal year ending March 2016.  Now, cloud computing services only generate revenue of only about Y100 billion for the firm.

Fujitsu recently restructured to reduce its exposure to volatile and capital-intensive businesses such as semiconductor production and hard disk drives.  And now, it is trying to pitch itself to corporations as an all-in-one provider of hardware, software and services a la IBM.

Yamamoto said that the company should have 5,000 cloud computing specialists on its staff by the end of March 2012, and that Fujitsu’s clients will see the benefits when they adopt the SaaS business model — expected by many industry experts to replace the sale of software in packages for installation on individual computers.

“Go East, young man” could be the new mantra of cloud IT pros, just as “Go West, young man, and grow up with the country!” uttered by an American newspaperman, was for the pioneers of America in the 1800s.

However things shape up, more and more firms — East and West (North and South, too) — will be coming to rely on monitoring services to keep their new cloud computing business gathering in the cash. So, it’s not just the end user who will need independent help keeping an eye on servers, networks, sites, bandwidth (you name it), but those very providers themselves.

A Sturm Cartoon About a Snail Mail Communication

A bit of a switch from my usual post content today. Wanted to tell you about this incredible experiment — seems incredible to me, anyway, especially in this day and age of the cloud and mobile web access.  Cartoonist James Sturm from Slate magazine has sworn off the web for a whole summer, and I am absolutely entranced by the idea that anybody in today’s business world could get along without it — heck, not just people in business but also the general world population as we know it!

Seems back in April, Sturm, running a school for cartoonists, married with kids and living among the picturesque hills of Vermont in New England in the USA, felt a mid-life crisis coming on and figured his time on earth was dwindling down. His answer to an ever-increasing online life of emails and web immersion (which meant time away from his family) was to quit it for the summer. But he worried, “Will I be liberated or left behind?”

Fast forward. Just checked Sturm’s blog (yes, he’s blogging about not blogging). We’re heading into high summer now in the Northern Hemisphere (and Vermont is pretty far north), and Sturm”s experiment is nearing an end. But while his emails are gone, readers are nonetheless writing actual letters, via snail mail (U.S.P.S.).

Says Sturm: “At least a quarter of the letters express discomfort with the actual writing of the letter and jokingly bemoan the lack of a backspace key or spell check. But I actually like seeing what you crossed out and what new direction you decide to take.

“…My only request to my correspondents would be to stop apologizing for your handwriting,” he continues. “I enjoy how distinctive it is—so much better than another boring stream of 14-point Helvetica flooding my inbox. Snail mail may not be as quick as e-mail, but it’s more human (which is also why I’m always disappointed when a cartoonist chooses the ease of some bland comic font instead of lettering their work themselves).

If I wasn’t in the IT business, and my work didn’t depend on being online all the time, I might consider this a fun experiment. I’m glad it’s working for Sturm; seems like he’s more productive and more creative and is more calm in his work.

So why am I writing about this? Because in my own weird way, I see a metaphor between what Sturm”s doing and what Monitis does. I’m here to let the IT managers and administrators take time off from IT management. I monitor servers and networks and websites and cloud services platforms and so on so that my customers can sleep at night. Granted, they’re not taking a sabbatical for a leafy, placid summer, but a break’s a break, no?

I’m not a social scientist by any means, but it’s interesting to see and theorize on the cultural differences between countries and their attitudes on data security and privacy.

The New York Times today ran an article about two worlds existing in Germany.

Germans Mixed up Over Data Security

One is the strict stance of the government there on data privacy. After World Ward II, Germany adopted strict rules on data privacy  — in an attempt to prevent the government from abusing information on citizens to persecute individuals. For example, did you know that in Germany, if you are a newspaper reporter, it’s illegal to give the full last name of a crime suspect (What a huge difference to an article in well, American newspapers, like the New York Times, where they give the suspect’s name and street address.)?

The other world within Germany is the world of the consumer, ever hungry for American technology and web services that share and sell some information on customers.

For example, while Google is being investigated by the German government for having errantly collected personal web information (such as e-mail passwords) while doing research for its Street View mapping service, the cloud giant and search engine company enjoys a 92% search market share in Germany. Clearly, German consumers and businesses like Google, and many of them are willing to sacrifice some personal information (clearly not information on what political party a person belongs to or whether they prefer boxers to briefs) to access its services. In other examples, there’s nearly 8 million Facebook users in Germany out of a total global customer population of over 80 million. And the Apple iPhone 4 sold out in days there, too.

“What I think we have in Germany is a big disconnect between data privacy laws and consumer sentiment toward privacy,” said Felix Haas, the chief executive and founder of Amiando, in the article. Amiando is a Munich-based company that is the largest online event registration platform in Europe. Routinely, attendees to corporate and other events go online and register — in the process, making public some information.

I predict that we’ll see an evolution of more liberal laws and attitudes about information-sharing in countries like Europe, as the reality of the web and doing business on the cloud confront companies, and as more and more companies there are drawn to the cloud.  On the other hand, we’ll also see more solid security standards being developed if more of the business world is to embrace the cloud with confidence.

A new poll out that I read about says that 60% of European enterprises surveyed plan to start migrating to the Cloud within the next two years. That’s exciting news, as far as I’m concerned, because it means that the cloud is truly becoming more global in nature. It’s not just a North American phenomenon.

The neat thing about this survey, too, was that it highlighted findings that make perfect sense — and mirror what’s happening elsewhere in the globe.  For example, the vast majority plan on deploying private clouds because they’re concerned about keeping their company data private and secure. But, of small and medium-sized businesses, 42% were planning to migrate to hosted solutions, that is, public clouds. In all cases, however, respondents’ biggest motivations for moving to the cloud was reducing costs, followed by improving business efficiency and business agility and competitiveness.  And isn’t every business today, no matter what language they speak or currency they use, looking for that, too?

Clients often ask me about the benefits of private versus public clouds, and which platforms they should employ. I think that the answer depends on which kind of information and applications you want to put on the cloud. Right now, highly sensitive data, such as sales figures and other financial information, perhaps would be better suited for a private cloud, or even kept housed internally. Yet, if you’re looking for cheap, resourceful ways to provide email and other collaborative apps to your employees, why not use a public cloud?

More than one-third of the survey respondents were most concerned about security, and felt that that issued kept them from moving to the cloud. How often have we heard that? Yet some IT experts are even of the opinion that public clouds sometimes provide better security that a company can internally.

Sir Winston Churchill

In this blog, I talk a lot about cloud security because I know that it’s an issue that keeps IT pros up at night — along with worry about whether their servers and networks are running smoothly. It’s a shame to see so many go without so much (to mangle a famous quote by Winston Churchill: “Never was so much owed by so many to so few.“)

I think an awful lot of  IT executives and managers — whether here in the U.S. or Europe or Asia — would feel a lot better about both private and public cloud security and reliability if they knew that they had the power to continually monitor the platforms to ensure that all was running smoothly, including cloud service providers, company websites and transactions.

I know that our customers feel a lot better about entrusting their data onto clouds — now that they have a 24/7 watchdog monitoring their services.

IBM and the University of Missouri are joining forces to create a cloud that will help the school develop and deliver data on some real important life sciences discoveries.

Usually, when I’ve written about schools and cloud providers getting together it’s to talk about improving administrative processes or offer staff and students 24/7 access to email or course content.  In fact, the interest in the cloud among schools is so strong that we at Monitis even designed a versatile and innovative plan to help schools migrate to the cloud.

But I was really impressed reading about what the University of Missouri plans for its cloud. The school will make use of IBM’s high-performance computing tech to grow the school’s bioinformatics research projects. The first phase of the research objective is to build a cloud computing environment for genomics research collaboration at a regional level.  The joint cloud will let school researchers share their findings and discoveries in a broad range of fields with each other in a quicker, more efficient fashion that currently.

And that not only represents administrative improvements, but also improves peoples’ lives. What do I mean, specifically? In the article I read about the development, most of what the University is working on involves the study of genome sequences in plants and animals that aims to help improve the quality and quantity of food production. MU researchers hope that the study of bovine genes will help them increase livestock reproductive efficiency and find ways to grow corn in drought conditions. Meanwhile, other projects are aimed at fighting the spread of infectious diseases such as malaria and H1N1.

Wow! Makes other schools cloud computing efforts seem a bit mundane, ha? It’s becoming more and more clear each day that cloud computing at schools is not only a way to better husband scarce resources and gain efficiencies and improve services for both students and staff, but it’s also a portal that’ll bring improved collaboration on some very important scientific projects — which will bring new benefits to humanity.

Brits Briskly Developing Mobile Apps

The federal government on the Yankee side of the pond isn’t the only government obsessed — albeit with caution — with the cloud.

The U.K. government, for instance, has spent tens of thousands of pounds developing iPhone applications, according to a recent news article. Specifically, the  Brits are spending between 10,000 and 40,000 pounds per application, and they’re aimed at citizens and should improve the way they get information from the government. For example, the U.K. government, otherwise known as Whitehall, is creating such projects as a travel advice application and a jobseekers’ app for the Foreign Office.  Also, there’s one called a “Quit Smoking” app and a “Drink Tracking” app — both costing around 10,000 pounds each.

A Driver and Vehicle Licensing Agency (DVLA) “Motoring Masterclass” app that would cost tax payers around £40,000 is also in development. Benefits? The DVLA Motoring Masterclass app could help motorists to renew their car tax, update their personal information and reduce work for DVLA employees.

Yanks no Slouches, Either

The hard development work in Britain is taking place in America, too.  On July 2nd,  the USA.gov website launched a re-design and a brand new application store featuring about 20 or so mobile applications — with some needing to be downloaded and others directly accessible via a browser. Among apps (some come with a price tag), there are a series of free health-related apps, too, for example, something called “UV Index by the EPA,” which you can use to check the UV Index and air quality ratings wherever you are.  Useful for the summertime!

Glad to see both governments doing their part to bring savings and efficiencies to U.S. taxpayers by increased use of the cloud.  Who would have thought that governments could be so farsighted as to see the savings in this important technology, especially now a days in these budget-crunching times?

For companies that depend on apps, including mobile ones, to keep their employees informed and productive on the road, it’s good to know that world-class monitoring services like Monitis exist to help ensure those apps are up and running — and if they’re not — that companies can be warned in time to get access again.