This is the second in a series of articles about ecommerce and shopping cart software that we hope will help web developers and system administrators in selecting what is best for their needs. The first article 20 Top Browser-Based Storefront Creation Services reviewed: Shopify; PrestaShop; 3D Cart; Nascent Commerce and Yahoo! Stores.

The following article details our own analysis of the next 5 vendors in our article series: Volusion; Mercantec; MerchandiZer; ShopSite and GoEmerchant.

In our previous article “Monitoring SharePoint 2010: Configuring the Usage Database”, we discussed the available performance counters and what they tell you.  In this article we’ll discuss bottlenecks; how to detect them; and how to resolve them.

In general terms bottlenecks are the result of insufficient resources to service transaction request. Bottlenecks can be physical hardware, operating system, or application related. More often than not though you will find that a bottleneck is caused by ‘homegrown’ code or 3^rd party solutions. Reviewing custom code could yield better results than simply adding more hardware to solve the issue. Another common issue that creates bottlenecks is an incorrect configured server or, an incorrect configured farm. Bottlenecks can also be caused by an inefficient design of the data structures causing those to require more resources than necessary.

For a system administrator, it is essential to manage bottlenecks by constantly monitoring performance. When you identify a performance issue, you must assess the best resolution for removing the bottleneck. The performance counters and other performance monitoring applications are key when analyzing problems.

At Monitis we like to think we make the lives of web developers and system administrators easy!

We have reviewed the 20 most popular shopping cart software and services companies and in a series of articles we would like to share our thoughts and opinions with you. We have included a list and short analysis of each of these ecommerce software products to help guide you in finding a solution that best suits your needs.

In addition to analyzing what we consider to be the pros and cons of each solution, we have provided an index graph that measures each company’s website. Using a 3^rd party website traffic analysis tool, we have displayed how these companies compete in popularity – this will give you an unbiased view of which of these products is generating more traction. Our firt article will cover the following 5 products/vendors: Shopify, PrestaShop, 3D Cart, Nascent Commerce and Yahoo! Stores.

1. Monitis-Top Command Line Tool in C#
A previous post introduced Monitis Top, a quick and easy tool to query your Monitis monitors from the command line. The original code was written in VBScript and we had promised a C# version. Here is that new version along with explanations of the class hierarchy and methods.

1. New Monitis Dashboard Video Tutorial
The Monitis team has made a dozen or so videos that walk through various aspects of the service. These can be found on the Tutorials page. A new video was just released that walks through the functionality of the Monitis dashboard. It shows how to customize the layout of the dashboard, how to share tabs and reports, and how to change the settings of monitors. If Monitis’ advanced UI is new to you, this video will serve as a perfect introduction.

1. Subversion repository monitoring with Monitis
If you’ve been following this blog, you’ve read about dozens of ways to use the Monitis platform to monitor a vast array of computer related metrics. This article takes a look at using Monitis to monitor something less common: code and contributors in a Subversion (SVN) repository. Code from the Monitis Github Page is provided. The results are really quite interesting. You can track the authors, commits and files in a project and even see changes to these numbers over time in a graph.

2. The simplicity of server monitoring: Monitis & M3
The powerful M3 (Monitis Monitor Manager) framework has been written about in a few previous articles: M3 – introduction and Planning your vacation / HTTP extraction. This post discusses motivation, design, implementation and the future of M3. The driving force behind M3 was the need to simplify usage of the API. The Monitis API is quite extensive and certain applications of it, though useful, can time consuming to set up. The post goes through an example showing how much time M3 saves a Monitis user. It also discusses future plans to extend M3 to virtually all Monitis actions, and to combine M3 with the MySQL DBI unit.

1. Monitor Everything with Monitis – And do it easily with PowerShell – Part 8
If you’ve read the last couple of articles in this series, you’ve seen some of the fun things you can monitor with WMI and Monitis. This article shows you how to see which users are logged on using WMI and monitor that with a Monitis Custom Monitor. A couple scripts with WMI calls are provided that you can run with Powershell. This is a pretty simple scenario to execute. The next piece in this series will look at monitoring access to shared folders.

2. 18 LAMP Security Tips for MySQL
LAMP stacks (Linux, Apache, MySQL and PHP) are an industry standard for comprehensive and robust servers. This is a checklist of 101 actions you can take to maximize security around LAMP. Hopefully this simplifies administering your system so that you can focus on other tasks. Some of the recommendations are to Grant minimal permissions, Separate read/write users, Use TLS, and Use syslog. Each tip has a 1 paragraph description. So if you are running a LAMP stack, this is a must read.

3. Monitor Everything with Monitis – And do it easily with PowerShell – Part 9
You’ve read how WMI and Monitis can be used to extract information, but what about waiting for events? This piece shows how to use PowerShell and WMI to make custom monitors that update whenever something happens on the system. There is a very important command: Register-WmiEvent. WmiEvents are a powerful feature of WMI: They can be used to tell you when something is happening in the operating system. This lets you listen for specific information in WMI and respond with an event. An example script shows how to find out who is connected to a shared folder on a server, and follow that information with an action.

1. Monitoring Performance on MongoDB – Mongo Basics
MongoDB is one of the most popular non-relational databases. It’s quite fast and scalable, and stores data in documents and collections instead of rows and tables. This article shows the basics of monitoring MongoDB. It’s really not much different from monitoring a relational database. MongoDB offers a useful HTTP Console that you can make REST calls to. It returns JSON responses that tell you information like uptime, master and slave info, outstanding cursors, etc. The next post will go into more detail.

2. GFI Software Reaches Further into the Cloud with Monitis Acquisition
The Monitis team is very happy to announce that they’ve been acquired by GFI Software! Monitis will continue to operate as a standalone brand and offer the same service you’re used to. Here’s a statement from Monitis CEO Hovhannes Avoyan: “Joining GFI Software gives us the capital, expertise and business resources that will enable us to make our products stronger and invest in features and functions that will help our customers’ businesses grow. GFI is a leader in the network monitoring and management market in the SMB space, and our solutions strongly complement one another now and will be increasingly interconnected as cloud computing continues to grow.”

1. Monitis-Top… an open-source command-line interface for Monitis Agents and Monitors

It is true that Monitis offers a powerful web-based UI, but many people prefer doing everything in a command-line interface. This post is for those people. It introduces Monitis Top, an open source command line interface to query the Monitis Agents and Monitors you have activated for your systems. Simple commands will list the monitors you have running along with performance data, inclunding CPU, Memory, Process monitors and also External monitors. The source code for Monitis Top is available in VBScript at the moment but will eventually be available in C#.

1. Monitor Everything with Monitis – And do it easily with PowerShell – Part 5
If you’ve read the previous posts in this series, you know how easy it is to set up monitors in Monitis using Powershell, without any downloads. This article shows some two powerful parameters of the Add-MonitisExternalMonitor command and how to use them in MS Excel to create all your web monitors in Powershell. The two important parameters of the Add -MonitisExternalMonitor command are ExpectedContentPattern – A regular expression you expect to find in the results, and RequiredResponseTime – the maximum amount of time it should take to get a response. In Excel, you can create a table with the columns Url, MonitorType, OperationType, Postdata, ExpectedContentPattern, RequiredResponseTime. Then simply fill in row by row the details of your monitors. Once you have them ready, you can save it as a CSV file and use the command Connect-Monitis -ApiKey $apiKey -SecretKey $secretKey
Import-Csv .\MyWebTest.csv | Add-MonitisExternalMonitor to create the monitors in Monitis. Yet another way to do a lot with just a few simple steps.