Last week I read an interesting article by Jabulani Leffall about the top IT security issues causing sleep-deprivation at University IT departments.    Among the top 10 were 1. Securing remote access, 3. Patching systems, 6. Network use monitoring, 8. Password management and administrative access, and 10. Monitoring system logs.

In all these case, using cloud-based monitoring has advantages over open source.  With Nagios or other open source products, you need to make frequent exceptions to your firewall to configure server monitors and also to make the Nagios dashboard accessible from outside your firewall.  With a SaaS like Monitis, you don’t need to touch your firewall because all data is pushed to the cloud via HTTPS and the dashboard is hosted on our servers, not yours.

Regarding patches, we echo the sentiment that they are a major downside of Nagios and software in general.  They reduce productivity and are a pain.  With Monitis, there are no patches or upgrades to worry about.  All product improvements are released seamlessly without your involvement, even for internal agents.

Password Management and administrative access are doable with open source, but not nearly as simple as in a SaaS, which lets you control user privileges from anywhere.

Monitoring of network use and system logs is possible with both solutions, but here’s where reliability makes a huge difference between cloud-based and open source.  Nagios usually runs on just one server within your firewall, making your entire system vulnerable to the problems of that one server.  If that server goes down you won’t receive critical notifications about your network use or system events. With Monitis, you have not just one server, but an entire monitoring network, so you can rest assured that we will notify you even when your entire network goes down.

There are often concerns about storing proprietary data on cloud servers.  These are legitimate concerns, especially for applications with confidential data like customers, students’ test scores, email, and health records.   Monitoring data shows the performance of servers, websites and applications like Moodle or Blackboard, which is far less confidential.  I think that explains why universities are showing increasing interest in cloud-based products, particularly in monitoring.

Have you ever used a SaaS solution where to do a simple task you had to load five pages and then navigate back to the home screen?  It can be frustrating, and despite the many advantages of SaaS vs. Software, user interface is usually not one of them.  One of the things we here at Monitis takes very seriously is saving our customers time and hassles.  That’s why we’ve created a super-intuitive, one-of-a-kind Ajax dashboard that looks and feels like a desktop application but exists completely within your browser.  You can easily move things around by drag-and-drop, rename labels with a click,… Heck you can set up monitoring for 1000 servers, generate graphs and notification rules for each without once loading a new page.  Let’s take a look at a few dashboard shortcuts that make tasks quick and easy.
The toolbar is packed with time-saving features.

The Share Page feature generates a link that lets you share a read-only view of your monitoring dashboard with anyone.  The link can be destroyed and recreated as you wish.  The read-only view is interactive, so the viewer can still drill-down into charts and tables to identify root causes.  A great way to quickly share information with your colleagues without compromising security or access privileges.

Changing the number of columns is convenient for quickly adjusting to different screen sizes and switching between cluttered and uncluttered views.  Any Monitis chart or report is a movable widget that falls under a column.  In the picture above, there are two columns.  This makes things legible on a tiny laptop or giant desktop.

Turning Flash charts on and off is another key feature.  We know that some browsers have issues with flash, so we’ve made both a flash and non-flash view of anything on the dashboard.  So you can even use Monitis at those 12-year old computers at the public library that run IE6.  The advantage of Flash is that the graphs are a little more interactive and aesthetically pleasing, but you get the same data in both views.  Here’s two ways to view a process monitor:

Using the calendar, you can easily go back in time and see past data for all monitors.  Live Chat and Support are a click away.  In addition to the toolbar, we also have a sidebar which can be turned on by selecting “Show Sidebar” under My Account.  The sidebar contains shortcuts to add External, Application, Internal, Cloud, and Traffic monitors and reports.  These are all just a click away from the menu bar along the top, but some users prefer a sidebar.

We will be releasing some amazing dashboard features soon, so expect a sequel to this post.

If you’re an IT person, you’ve probably experienced a flood of alerts to your phone or email for a downtime issue you already knew about.  Chances are there’s also been a time when you weren’t notified fast enough for an important issue only to hear about it from management a day later.  These all too common incidents are why a powerful notification module is necessary for a great IT monitoring solution. 

The two main qualities to look for are reliability (to make sure you get notified when you need to) and flexibility (to specify when and how to receive notifications and when not to).  At Monitis we’ve taken great measures to ensure the reliability of our notifications.  We use world-class and backup providers for SMS and Email alerts, the same used by Oracle, Nokia, and CNN.  We are also cloud-based, which means that if your entire data-center goes down, our notification system will still be up to alert you.  The same is not true for monitoring software.  

We’ve also designed our notification system to be flexible and easy-to-setup.  Here are some features that come in very handy.  

Here we have set up a rule for one contact to receive email alerts after 3 consecutive failures in European monitoring locations, and we are preparing  a rule to receive SMS alerts after 2 consecutive failures in the US.   By using the options pointed out and combining multiple rules, any customized notification strategy can be achieved to ensure that the proper person gets notified at the right time when this monitor reads a failure.  We can have alerts sent to admins after 1 minute of downtime, and an alert sent to the IT manager after 10 minutes of downtime creating an escalation path for persistent failures.

                We also have the option to set rules for a contact rather than a monitor.  For example, you can specify that an email address should receive notifications after 3 US failures for any external monitor or from a group of monitors with a common tag name.  First click on the settings icon in the Contacts box and “Specify Rules.”  This form will pop up.