To start using EC2 monitoring you can either sign up for a trial plan, which includes 2 EC2 instance monitoring possibility for 15 days, sign up for Plus plan in case you will need only 1 EC2 instance monitoring or build your plan yourself in order to have some flexibility in case the number of your instances is increasing or decreasing. After you have finished with the above mentioned steps just login using your credentials and follow this steps to add EC2 monitor:

Step1: In this step you’re providing your Amazon account credentials. Please make sure that your private key name is exactly the same as the one you started your instance with. 

Step 2: In this step you’re going to add your contact(e-mail, IM or SMS) in order to be able to receive alerts related to your EC2 instances. You can skip timezone, send weekly reports, and contact group fields for now and change them later.

Step 3: In this step you will setup notification rules for your currently running instances, more clearly you will specify the max number of running instances allowed, your contact which we’ve added in the previous step, so you will get alert when the number of your currently running instances reaches your specify threshold.

Step 4: In this step you will setup policies(different monitors) you want each of your instances be monitored for. Please make sure to provide correctly your private key in Step 1, in order our agent can be automatically installed on your instance.

Step 4 is finalizing EC2 monitor setup process. The following module will be added automatically to your dashboard.

Drive, CPU, Load Average, Memory columns are related to internal policies selection and in case you’ve selected any of these during Step 4,  but you still see “Activate” values for them that means that something is wrong with agent installation(most probably related to your provided private key). HTTP, PING, SSH are checking your instance(s) from our monitoring locations and don’t require anything to be installed on your instance. Other configuration related columns like Instance ID, Image ID, Public DNS, Launch Time, Availability Zones and Key Name are gathered and shown automatically.

That’s it you’re EC2 instance monitoring is up and running.

Provisioning both external availability and internal systems performance monitoring is one of key differentiators for Monitis. For internal monitoring Monitis provides downloadable agents which could be installed anywhere within client network. They will submit data to Monitis Central Server for storage, access and notification. When installed within corporate firewall, agents will communicate with the central server for user authentication and will check which tasks were assigned to them. Agents will use HTTPS so no need to change anything on firewall. Users (e.g. IT specialist like system or network administrators) can see a list of installed agents on Monitis web dashboards, and can remotely monitor server, network or intranet applications. Agent polls the server on regular intervals and when got a new monitoring task they start doing new probes. The Agent performance data transmitted over the internet to the Central Server can be watched in real time. The overall process of setting the agent and receiving performance metrics takes a few minutes. In contrast to software approach, with hosted service IT specialists don’t need to worry about having a dedicated server, database, notifications setup etc. Agents are available for Windows, Linux and Sun Solaris platform. Agents can be installed on any user desktop and will not consume much CPU, memory and bandwidth and can co-exist with other applications. When installed, they can not only monitor the desktop or server they installed but also any device in their neighborhood. Agents use ping, http, SNMP and WMI for monitoring intranets and also they can deliver CPU, memory, process and disk usage metrics.

Following are IPs we monitor from:

US - 208.76.244.82
DE - 80.190.241.157
UK - 213.165.245.114
Panama - 190.5.236.105
Australia - currently there are some changes so no fixed IP at the moment just open your firewall, or exclude from the logs the following range 203.57.0.0/16

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

This opportunity is provided to all users using different plans. You will find “Buy SMS” item in the Tools section of your menu as it is shown in the screen shot below. After clicking on this item you will be presented with the following pop up.

Current balance shows the number of used SMSs out of available ones. Total number of available SMSs consists of free SMSs allocated each month corresponding to each plan and purchased SMSs. Expiration date of free SMSs is one month which means that even if you didn’t use all the allocated free SMSs within the month period they can not be accumulated.  The next month you will have the same number of available free SMSs as in previous months. Purchased SMSs don’t have any expiration date and can be used as long as you’ve subscribed to our service.

To make a purchase just input the number of SMSs you will like to buy(minimum number of SMSs that can be purchased is 20). When changing the number in SMSs field the total price will be calculated automatically and will be shown in Total Price field. When you’re finished with this step, the only thing left is to make a payment using PayPal. Just click on the Order button and in a few seconds you will be redirected to PayPal. After successfully proceeding with payment refresh your page and check you Current Balance - it should be increased by the number of your purchased SMSs.

Go to Saved Modules and click on Contacts menu item, if it is not already opened on your dashboard. After that click on pen icon, which is located in the header part of the Contacts module as it is shown in the following snapshot

Choose SMS option in the combo box of available notification types. You will see First Name, Last Name and Mobile Phone fields, which should be filled, especially it is very important to enter a valid number in the Mobile Phone field. Please click on the help icon on the right side of that field to see an example and instructions regarding the necessary format for mobile number. After filling the above mentioned fields click on the Add button. If the phone number was entered correctly you will receive an SMS message with activation code. Also a new row will be added in the contacts table, which will be highlighted with red color, to show that contact is not confirmed yet. To confirm the contact you should click on that row, enter an activation number provided in SMS into the corresponding field and click on Apply button (see below).

If everything was correct after refreshing the page you will see that above mentioned row is not highlighted anymore. That means that your SMS notifications are enabled and you’re done with SMS activation. After that you can deactivate/activate SMS notifications anytime by simply checking and uncheking checkbox in the Active column.

Often users ask questions regarding payments with PayPal. Because www.monitis.com is also uses PayPal as it’s only payment method, it will be worth to describe the process of payment. So after filling in the necessary info and accepting Terms of Service you are redirected to PayPal. In the following snapshot you can see an example of “Basic plan” as it is shown in PayPal. As you can see in the “Terms” section the first 30 days are totally FREE and only after that you should pay in order to use the service afterwards.

If you already have an existing PayPal account you should choose the corresponding option as it is shown in following snapshot and fill in the necessary info for using your account.

Otherwise you should sign up for PayPal account by choosing “No PayPal account” and filling the necessary info as it is shown in the following snapshot. You can use any credit card for opening a PayPal account(it will take a couple of minutes). It is worth to mention that all information is confidential and is handled by PayPal which ensures it security.

So now when you’re finished with subscription you will be redirected to Monitis home page and can use your e-mail and password for logging in to your Monitis account.