According to Forrester Research, three directions will influence IT management software market: 1) the evolution of IT infrastructure and application technologies; 2) the economic factors; and 3) the evolution of IT management technology. Application performance management is gaining more importance because of 1) the widespread use J2EE application servers; 2) the proliferation of distributed and powerful servers; and 3) business service management (BSM) approach for IT management optimization.

 ITIL (Information Technology Infrastructure Library), a set of concepts of managing IT infrastructure, development and operations, will be one of the buzzwords in 2008. Enterprises consider ITIL compliance as a way to reach efficient operations. Although, as Forrester predicts, there is still a deep disconnect between ITIL and BSM.

 IT expenditures are expected to have 8% growth in 2008. Enterprises that will continue investments in 2008 are those who 1) are motivated by cutting the IT operations cost and/or 2) consider quality of service as a competitive advantage.  Enterprises using IT management at the tactical level will have mixed feelings, although a major trend is toward moving IT management tools to the strategic category.  

 The highest growth expected in end user experience management category (72%), followed by change and configuration management (37%) and SLM/BSM (36%).

Monitis and its related service Semonics are offering variety of checks, monitors, tracking tools and alerting which could be valuable utility for  search engine marketing and online brand management. Bellow the diagram represents what kind of metrics can be measured and which is the impact of the metrics on traffic and cost.

Keywords:  search marketing, search engine marketing, search engine optimization, seo, sem, traffic, web traffic, brand management, brand monitoring, buzz monitoring, web analytics, external monitoring, search ranking, online reputation

Keywords: Monitis, external monitoring, network monitoring, systems monitoring, transactions monitoring, web analytics, performance dashboard, SLA reports, Resource Utilization Monitoring, load analysis, quality reports, page load time,applications monitoring, visitor tracking

During the day we were receiving messages regarding the problem with one of the major backbone providers, Global Crossing whose fiber optic network covers more than 100,000 route miles, reaching six continents, 60 countries and more than 600 major cities. There are some problems being experienced on the following routes; from Global Crossing to Internap, Level3, Savvis, SBC, Verizon, XO. This is reason many websites during the day are experiencing problems with availability and latency.

As Monitis introduced a new check type - Advanced DNS, in this article I would like to provide brief description of DNS and how it works in general. On the internet DNS(Domain Name System) associates various sorts of information with domain names and translates human-readable computer hostnames into the IP addresses that networking equipment needs for delivering information. The most basic use of DNS is to translate hostnames to IP addresses.

The domain name space consists of a tree of domain names. Each node or leaf in the tree has one or more resource records, which hold information associated with the domain name. The tree sub-divides into zones, which consists of a collection of connected nodes authoritatively served by an authoritative DNS nameserver, the one that publishes information about that domain and the name servers of any domains “beneath” it. A resolver looks up the information associated with nodes and knows how to communicate with name servers by sending DNS requests, and heeding DNS responses. Resolving usually entails iterating through several name servers to find the needed information.

Users generally do not communicate directly with a DNS resolver, instead DNS-resolution takes place transparently in client-applications such as web-browsers, mail-clients, and other Internet applications.

You can refer to the following link http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Domain_name_system in case you would like to go in more details with DNS mechanism.

Good news for blog and website owners, managers, web marketer and webmasters! With updated Monitis Visitor Tracking service you can now monitor in real-time not only the number of visits and pageviews, but also get comprehensive statistics related to your visitors, such as their countries, cities, IPs, OSs used, browsers used, referrers, which show where they came from and keywords, which were used to find your site. So by combining every piece of information together you will get an overall view and better understanding of your web performance.

Countries and Cities view of your visitors widget will help you to find out if you targeted your products or services to the intended markets or not, or in case you do some advertisement if you are succeeding with it or not. You can see below some screenshots, which illustrate how visits demographic statistics will be shown on your dashboard.

The next important piece of information is IPs of your visitors, which could be used to distinguish the ISPs your visitors use more often. By using this info you can find out why much of your visitors are using this ISP and not the other one. Maybe the problem is in your site’s slow response?

Operating Systems of your visitors will be of interest for you in case you’re selling some software products for specific OSs. So this info will help you to find out if your visitors will likely use your software or not. In case you will see that most of your visitors are using an OSs which your product doesn’t support, maybe it will help you to decide to support that OS in the next release of your product.

On the other side for the providers of web services it will be more of interest to find out popular browsers. In case you see that most of your visitors are using Firefox, but you know that IE is more widespread nowadays, you will try to find out the cause of this trend, maybe your website is not supporting well IE.

Finally lets consider Referrers and Keywords statistics. Referrers will help you to monitor where your visitors come from, in case you’re running ad campaign somewhere, you can monitor if you succeed with it by looking on the number of visitors referred from the website your ad is placed on. Keywords  let you find out the words or phrases which your visitors are using in search engines and afterwards bring them to your website. This information will help you to optimize the site for search engines, better selecting and tuning keywords in the content of your page or blog.

We’ve now finished with the description of each piece of data, and we think this info will help online shops, service providers, and others to know  their visitors better, thus satisfy their needs better, which is the most important thing in every business nowadays.

We also provide these statisitcs in our free service at http://mon.itor.us, but in limited scope.

In this article I would like to explain status codes and other info provided in notification e-mails of Monitis for a services with HTTP checks.

HTTP protocol has the following types of error codes:

2xx - this codes indicate success

In recovery notifications you will often get 200 - OK HTTP response code, which means that the request was fulfilled.

4xx - codes are intended for cases in which the client seems to have errors

5xx - codes are intended for cases in which the server is aware that the server has errors

Most common errors of the above mentioned types are:

400 - the request had bad syntax or was inherently impossible to be satisfied

401 - the client should try the request with a suitable Authorization header

403 - the request is for something forbidden. Authorization will not help

404 - the server has not found anything matching the URI given

500 - the server encountered an unexpected condition which prevented it from fulfilling the request

Beside the above mentioned status codes during HTTP checks you will also get the following information:

Connection timed out after 10 sec. - which means that for some reasons monitoring server couldn’t conduct a check during 10 seconds

Connection refused - for some reasons monitored server refused the connection request from our monitoring server

Wrong response HTTP header received - monitoring server received a response with a wrong HTTP header

Connection lasted more than 10 seconds - which means that response is exceeded 10 seconds, which is set as a timeout for HTTP check

So here it is, we’re finished with HTTP checks and will discuss the other check types in the upcoming articles.