Today we are launching something that we think is truly groundbreaking: Free Internal Monitoring. Now users of Mon.itor.Us, the free Monitis, can download our internal agents into Windows and Linux servers and monitor CPU, Memory, Disk, Load Average, MySQL, Processes, HTTP, Ping, and even SNMP, for free. Best of all, since we are a hosted service, all the performance data gets pushed to our cloud and you can access/manage it from anywhere. We hope IT Managers will enjoy free usage of software that’s typically very expensive. Here’s how to get started on a Windows machine.

We’ve gotten good feedback from our video tutorials so far so we’re going to make some more. Reporting IT performance is one of the tasks of an IT administrator. It has often been a pain, so we tried to design our reporting module to make this process as effortless as possible. You can create and manage custom reports for any monitor or a group of monitors using the Add Report wizard located in the Monitis dashboard. These will show uptime and response time numbers on a monthly, weekly, daily, or custom basis. Once you click add, the report gets added to the dashboard and populated with data. You can select different views, like line chart, bar chart, table, etc. You can export the data as a PDF or CSV. You can also make it a public report with your logo, perfect for sharing with clients. You can also have reports emailed to a list of contacts periodically by going to Reports>Emailed Reports. For added convenience, you have the option of turning emailed reports on while adding new contacts.

Whether you manage an eCommerce site, SaaS, university portal, or web app, load testing is extremely important for keeping IT managers well rested and users happy. At universities, online registration applications MUST handle the spike in users at the beginning of each semester for chaos not to ensue. If Ecommerce companies are unable to meet holiday peak traffic, even for a few hours, they lose sales and customers. That’s why thousands of organizations rely on Monitis’ Load Testing, an on-demand, easy to use tool for measuring your site’s performance during a spike in traffic.

If you have a Monitis or Mon.itor.us account, you can use the load testing widget on your dashboard. Otherwise you can use our dedicated load testing dashboard at webloadtester.com. These all work the same on the back end and give you the same report. To start, simply list the url’s you want to load test. Then select the number of nodes (servers) you want to point to the urls. You can select up to five nodes. Now select the number of connections, or virtual users, per node, up to 2000. Next specify the duration of the test, in minutes. If you select “Include embedded resources,” each visit will load the entire webpage in a real browser. Otherwise each visit waits for an HTTP response.

Once you have these parameters set, you’ll see a price quote calculated using the parameters you’ve set. You’re ready to add funds to your account and load test. When your test is complete, we’ll email you a report that shows how your site(s) faired during each minute of the test. You can also do an Advanced HTTP test for a site that requires basic authentication. Monitis also offers Database load testing for MySQL, Oracle and MS SQL database applications, and SOAP load testing.

Another week, another Monitis video, only this time it’s not really a tutorial but a demo of our dashboard features. It starts out by showing the basics. You can make multiple tabs and place different information on each, so it’s not unlike a browser within a browser. Data for a specific monitor is placed into a widget you can easilyy resize or drag and drop. In these widgets you can see a table or chart of monitoring data. Clicking the edit button opens a drop down menu containing all settings, allowing you to change all the settings of a monitor without navigating away.

The toolbar at the bottom right of the page contains some useful features. First there’s the Share Page button, which allows you to share a read-only version of any tab on your dashboard with the outside world via a link. You can place your company logo on these shared pages. Next, the column button lets you change the number of columns on a tab to see information in a more or less condensed fashion. There is a Flash button which lets you taggle between Flash and non-Flash charts, but since we are almost completely HTML5 now, this will soon be phased out. There is a button that lets you collapse and expand all widgets at once on a page, useful for finding things fast. There’s a calendar which lets you go back in time and see historical data just by clicking a past date. There are also links to Support and News.

In My Account>Options, you can change your default language (English, Russian, French and German are supported), skin colors(Blue, Grey, Pink, Blackberry), and date format(US and UK). Under My Account you can also add Notes and a Task List to your dashboard, and access your Affiliate link. All users have their own affiliate link which rewards them with 10% of all first year revenues of signups through that link. As always, you can view this and other tutorials on our Tutorials page or our Youtube page.

Monitoring your site’s uptime is important, but it’s just as important to know the cause of downtime. That’s why Monitis offers internal monitoring, so you can know which processes on your server crashed before your site went down. Traffic monitoring also gives you insight into your website’s performance by allowing you to correlate the number of website visitors to response time. There are lots of tools available for monitoring traffic, but it’s harder to see their numbers side by side with monitoring data. Our new tutorial shows how to set up and view a traffic monitor. To view this and other tutorials or request a live demo, check our Demo page, and subscribe to our Youtube channel.

To get started, simply go to Add Monitor>Traffic Monitor, enter the URL you’d like to track visits for, and a bit of javascript code will appear. Cut and paste this code at the end of the body section of your HTML source code. Now Monitis will record the number of visits you get each hour. You can see this data on your dashboard in a table or bar chart. You can also create a report to analyze daily, weekly, or monthly trends.

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.