Monitis has added yet another video tutorial, this time showing how users can monitor their cloud instances on Amazon AWS, Rackspace, and GoGrid in just a few minutes. To view this and other tutorials or request a live demo, check our Demo page, and subscribe to our Youtube channel.

Previous videos showed how to set up internal monitoring on a physical server using the Monitis Smart Agent. Once installed, the agent collects and sends performance data to Monitis. The agent works on cloud instances too, but you’ll have to install an agent on each new instance. Cloud monitoring automates this process, so you can start monitoring your entire cloud with the click of a button.

The video shows how to configure an account with Amazon EC2. Go to Add Monitor>Cloud Monitor and select Amazon EC2. Enter an Account Name of your choosing, your Amazon AWS Account Number, Account Key, and Secret Key, all provided by Amazon when signing up. Next select the Amazon region you’ve signed up for. You’ll be prompted to upload your Amazon EC2 private key. Monitis will now authenticate you into your Amazon account. You can set monitoring and notification rules to specify what gets monitored on your servers and when alerts should be sent. Monitis can monitor your cloud instances both internally via agent for CPU, Processes, etc., and externally via SSH, HTTP, or Ping. Your Amazon instances will appear on your dashboard along with their performance statistics.

We received some great feedback about video tutorials for External, Internal, Transaction, and Full Page Monitoring, so we’ve decided to make more tutorials. This week we’ve added one for network monitoring.

For starters, you can easily Ping an IP address behind your firewall from a server on which you’ve installed our agent. Simply go to Add Monitor>Internal, check Ping, and enter the IP Address. You can set thresholds for # of Lost Packets and Packet size and set alerts to be notified by email, SMS, Phone call, or IM if these thresholds are reached.

SNMP, short for Simple Network Monitoring Protocol, is the most common protocol for checking network-attached devices, such as routers and switches, for conditions that warrant administrative attention. Once you have the Monitis Agent installed on one of your servers, you can configure SNMP on our web-based dashboard by going to Add Monitor>Internal, checking SNMP, entering the Host IP and the Object Identifier. Every network device comes with Object Identifiers that let you monitor certain characteristics of the device. You can also set up an SNMP Trap, which, instead of polling the device periodically, sends an urgent message to Monitis when a specific problem occurs. Watch as we set one of each of these monitors up in the video, and feel free to try yourself by signup up for our 15 day trial.

The third of our new video tutorials shows how to set up internal monitoring. With other products this is usually a time-consuming process, sometimes taking weeks. Servers usually need a VPN connection to your monitoring server. This can be a pain to set up, especially with remote servers, and particularly with open source systems like Nagios and Zenoss. You also need a database to store historical data and a reporting module. Monitis cuts setup time to 5 minutes by utilizing every shortcut enabled by cloud computing. Instead of reporting to your server, the Monitis internal agent sends encrypted data to the Monitis Cloud via https where it is stored on world class servers. Let’s walk through the steps outlined in the video to set up internal monitoring for 10 servers. We’ll time it. First we log into Monitis, click Add Monitor to load the internal monitoring wizard, and download the proper agent for our operating system. (30 seconds so far)

We are running Linux, so we can automatically install the agent on all ten machines. It takes about 3 minutes. If you’re running Windows, it takes 1 minute to install and activate (with your login) on each server. Here’s a Windows agent that’s been activated.

Firewalls don’t need to be touched since the agent only uses port 443. The same setup.zip file can be used to install the agent on multiple servers, so you only need to download once. Also, you’ll never need to upgrade agents because upgrades are done automatically without manual intervention. Next we go back to the internal monitoring wizard. A list of names assigned to your agents will load. You can assign a tag-name to group internal monitors together. This comes in handy when generating reports. We can multi-select all ten agents and select the metrics to monitor (CPU utilization, memory, drive, http, ping), and click Add. (45 seconds) Dozens of movable, re-sizable graphs appear on the dashboard. Soon they are populated with data.

It took just 4 minutes and 15 seconds to set this up. The time-saving features can be narrowed down to three main points.
1. Agents report to Monitis via https, no need to touch your firewall. Just install and you’re ready to go.
2. Upgrades are done automatically without your intervention. No more concern about patches or versions.
3. Internal Monitoring Wizard lets you configure through any browser, and bulk-configuration of agents is quick and easy.

This video focused on server monitoring. We have another video coming that focuses on network monitoring with SNMP, so stay tuned.

About a year ago my friends and I were scouring the web for cheap weekend packages to Vegas. We found a great deal at Vegas.com that came out to ~$200 each for flight and 2 nights stay, right on the strip. It seemed too good to be true, and it was, because when each time we clicked the Purchase button, it stalled. We tried several times until midnight at which point the price rose by $100. We ended up buying a package on Expedia, whose payment application worked fine.

This is an example of how millions of dollars in sales are lost each day to web application errors. When applications like travel-planners and shopping carts malfunction, they not only hurt sales figures but also tarnish a brand’s reputation. That’s why transaction monitoring is such a valuable investment for e-commerce companies. We’ve made a new video tutorial to show you how easy it is to get started.

Our Transaction Recorder is a Firefox plug-in that records your actions in Firefox. Simply go through the business-critical steps of your web application and watch as the recorder generates a script with commands like click, type, etc. You can manually enter commands to pause, wait for text, or wait for elements. Once the script is complete, you can save it and add it to your dashboard. We will show you how long each step takes to execute, and if there’s an error, we’ll show you a screen capture of the browser and a detailed view of all the objects in the faulty webpage.

Starting this week Monitis is rolling out new video tutorials that will guide users through setting up each type of monitor. The videos are located under the Resources tab of our homepage.  One of the videos is for Full Page Load monitoring, which has been a huge hit since we added it to our services a few weeks ago. It allows users to analyze how objects in their webpage are loading in real browsers in different parts of the world and identify bottlenecks. This is an extremely important measure for understanding user experience, as studies have shown that even a slight lag in load time can cause a noticeable drop in viewership and sales. As the video highlights, Amazon.com discovered that a 100 ms increase in load time resulted in a 1% drop in sales.  One might consider 100ms an unnoticeable duration, but 1% of Amazon’s annual sales is a whopping $300 million! Load time is also one of the parameters used by Google in determining a website’s PageRank.

Adding Full Page Load monitors is very easy.  Simply go to Add Monitor>Full Page Load, enter the url, a name and tagname for your monitor, a timeout threshold, frequency in minutes, and the locations from which to monitor. Click add and it will be added to the dashboard instantly. You can edit settings and add notification rules by click the pencil icon at the top. Clicking a datapoint reveals how the objects loaded during a particular test.  Objects include CSS scripts, Javascript, individual images, RSS, redirects, Frames and iFrames. The load times of these components are shown in a graphical view sometimes called a waterfall, and also in a sortable table. For each object, Monitis lists the following quantities: HTTP Response Code, Total Download time, DNS, Connection, 1st byte, Content Download, and number of bytes.  Sorting these quanities allows the user to quickly identify bottlenecks in the webpage. For example, sorting the DNS column brings the objects with the longest DNS time to the top.

One of our users, a large online news service, found that the website was loading fast save for a couple banner ads that were taking longer than 30 seconds to load. A customer in the education space found that pictures were taking too long to load and needed to be compressed or switched to .png files.

So, below is the video for your viewing pleasure. And if you’d like pricing details check out our Plan Builder. Full Page Load monitoring starts at just $5/month for the same plan that some of our competitors charge $50/month for!

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.

Monitis supports IM(instant messengers), e-mail and SMS

We accept PayPal as well as any credit cards(MasterCard, VISA, American Express). In case you have some specific needs we can also accept wire transfers and checks.

For external monitors check intervals can start from 1 minute to 60 minutes depending on the plan. For internal monitors check interval is fixed to 5 minutes. Transaction monitors use 20 minutes check interval.