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New Monitis Dashboard Video Tutorial

Hovhannes Avoyan — Mon, 14 Nov 2011 12:12:06 +0000

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Start Exploring Monitis API with cURL

Hovhannes Avoyan — Tue, 07 Jun 2011 19:22:02 +0000

Monitis is a powerful one-stop monitoring shop for systems and web administrators. It is fully hosted, so setup and usage are far easier than with traditional software solutions. In addition to website and server monitoring, Monitis is a monitoring platform that allows users to build their own monitoring applications, to monitor anything. This is done using the Monitis API. The API lets users extend, automate, and integrate the monitoring and notification platform as they wish, and also create and manage accounts and account privileges. This makes Monitis a very practical solution for MSPs (managed service providers) and IT support companies.

Monitis REST API

Monitis provides a powerful API (Application Programming Interface) for extending basic functionality and integrating with other tools. Developers and sysadmins can use command shell scripts or programming languages to enhance the system. They can also manage their accounts and privileges, add and remove server monitoring, retrieve monitoring results, and even create custom monitoring process. In this article we provide some external server monitoring use case scenarios using the popular command line tool cURL. The API is built on the HTTP REST protocol, so cURL lets users do all the API calls and build even create sophisticated scripts.

The following parameters are needed for API calls:

apikey, secretkey – api keys, which you can get from within your Monitis account (Tools->API->API Key) . apikey is your identification key and cannot be changed, secretkey is similar to password can be reset if needed.
action – action to perform
timestamp – current date/time in GMT with yyyy-MM-dd HH:mm:ss format
validation – type of validation. In our examples we will use ‘token’ fixed value for authToken validation.
authToken – a session authentication token, generated by Monitis. Token is valid until 24 hours after generation.
version – API version (2 for current version)

What is cURL?

A command line tool for getting or sending files using URL syntax. cURL uses libcurl, a free, portable, client-side URL transfer library that builds and works identically on several platforms (including Solaris, NetBSD, FreeBSD, OpenBSD, HPUX, IRIX, AIX, Tru64, Linux, UnixWare, Windows, etc.). cURL supports FTP, FTPS, Gopher, HTTP, HTTPS, SCP, TFTP, TELNET, DICT, FILE, LDAP, LDAPS, IMAP, POP3, SMTP, and RSTP protocols. cURL also supports HTTPS certificates, HTTP POST, HTTP PUT, FTP uploading, kerberos, HTTP form based upload, proxies, cookies, user and password identification, file transfer resume, and http proxy tunneling.

To retrieve a web page, just type: curl www.anydomain.com

Basic use cases

Session initialization

Before your can use the API you need to get a user key and temporary AuthToken for usage within 24 hours.

Get the AuthToken using the following cURL command:

curl 'http://www.monitis.com/api?action=authToken&apikey=[Your API key]&secretkey=[D86AOEP8MC7A896L945KHBNYKF]'
Example:

curl 'http://www.monitis.com/api?action=authToken& apikey=2KFGBIUO2HCFC24II109P39E3G& secretkey=4HM0CPPCTSJAHQMMFJTGSQRQG9'

Example response:

{"authToken":"44PNIH0HFQUCB2PVC7QLKUU9FT"}

Now you can use the authToken in the remaining operations, just keep in mind that it is valid for 24 hours and you may need to get another authToken afterwards.

Now let consider some basic tasks you can perform using the cURL command line tool. Click here for a detailed list of Monitis cURL API examples.

User Management

Add Sub Account

You can add new users to the same account and define user access privileges. New user can be added via the add sub account method. Format:

curl 'http://www.monitis.com/api' --data 'apikey=[Your API key]&validation=token&authToken=[Your auth token]×tamp=[Current timestamp]&action=addSubAccount&firstName=[John]&lastName=[Smith]& email=[john%40js.com]&password=[pass4js]&group=[test_group]'
Example:

Example response:

{"status":"ok","data":{"userId":12518}}

Layout

You can change dashboard layout and add new pages also using API calls.

Add Page to Monitoring Dashboard

Here we add a new page to a monitoring dashboard, so next time you open the dashboard you can see a new tab added. Use the following cURL format:

curl 'http://www.monitis.com/api' --data 'apikey=[Your API key]&validation=token&authToken=[Your auth token]×tamp=[Current timestamp]&action=addPage&title=[New Page]&columnCount=[2]'
Example:

{"status":"ok","data":{"pageId":66546}}

Notification Contacts

Monitis sends web server failure alert notifications to contacts or groups of contacts. Users may add, edit, delete, activate contacts via the API.

Add Alert Notification Contact

Format:

curl 'http://www.monitis.com/api' --data 'apikey=[Your API key]&validation=token&authToken=[Your auth token]×tamp=[Current timestamp]&action=addContact&group=[customers]&firstName=[John]&l astName=[Smith]&account=[8006577949]&contactType=[2]& timezone=[-300]&sendDailyReport=[true]&sendWeeklyReport=[true]& sendMonthlyReport=[true]&portable=[true]&country=[US]&textType=[true]'
Example:

curl 'http://www.monitis.com/api' --data 'apikey=2KFGBIUO2HCFC24II109P39E3G&validation=token& authToken=1JP2U03EVV5FNEKGFVDD4OVOA9×tamp=2011-05-23 20:15:14&action=addContact&group=customers&firstName=John&l astName=Smith&account=8006577949&contactType=2& timezone=-300&sendDailyReport=true&sendWeeklyReport=true& sendMonthlyReport=true&portable=true&country=US&textType=true'
Example response:

{"status":"ok","data":{"confirmationKey":"76489116","contactId":14246}}

Get Recent Failure Alerts

Format:

curl 'http://www.monitis.com/api?apikey=[Your API key]&action=recentAlerts&timezone=[180]&startDate=[startDate]& endDate=[endDate]&limit=[20]'
Example:

curl 'http://www.monitis.com/api?apikey=2KFGBIUO2HCFC24II109P39E3G& action=recentAlerts&timezone=180&startDate=2011-01-01&endDate=2012-01-01&limit=20'
Example response:

{"status":"ok","data":[{ "dataType":"External Monitor", "recDate":"8 May 2011 07:09:59 GMT", "dataId":36963, "failDate":"8 May 2011 07:04:58 GMT", "dataTypeId":0, "contacts":"someAccount@gmail.com", "dataName":"api_dns" }]}

External Server Monitors

We will consider here an example of external website uptime and responce time monitoring, although similar scenario can be done for server health, network and other types of monitoring. Sysadmins can add/remove/edit server uptime monitors and also get get website performance results using the Monitis API. Let’s consider examples of adding and getting server response and page load time from global checkpoints.

Add External Server Uptime Monitor

Format:

curl 'http://www.monitis.com/api' --data 'apikey=[Your API key]&validation=token&authToken=[Your auth token]×tamp=[Current timestamp]&version=2&action=addExternalMonitor&type=[http]& name=[mon.itor.us_http]&tag=[mon.itor.us]&url=[mon.itor.us]&l ocationIds=[1,4]&interval=[5]&timeout=[100000]&overSSL=[false]& detailedTestType=[1]&contentMatchFlag=[1]&contentMatchString=[Easy-to-use Monitoring as a Service]>'
Example:

curl 'http://www.monitis.com/api' --data 'apikey=2KFGBIUO2HCFC24II109P39E3G&validation=token& authToken=1JP2U03EVV5FNEKGFVDD4OVOA9×tamp=2011-05-23 20:15:14&action=addExternalMonitor&type=http&name=mon.itor.us_http& tag=mon.itor.us&url=mon.itor.us&locationIds=1&interval=5& timeout=100000&overSSL=false&detailedTestType=1& contentMatchFlag=1&contentMatchString=Easy-to-use Monitoring as a Service>'
Example response:

{"status":"ok","data":{"startDate":"2011-05-23 20:53","testId":54935,"isTestNew":"1"}}

Suspend Uptime Monitoring

Format:

curl 'http://www.monitis.com/api' --data 'apikey=[Your API key]&validation=token&authToken=[Your auth token]×tamp=[Current timestamp]&action=suspendExternalMonitor&tag=[tag]'

Example:

Example response:

{"status":"ok"}

Get Uptime Monitoring Info

Users can get settings for a server monitor using the following command:

curl 'http://www.monitis.com/api?apikey=[Your API key]&action=testinfo&testId=[4596]'
Example:

curl 'http://www.monitis.com/api?apikey=2KFGBIUO2HCFC24II109P39E3G& action=testinfo&testId=54935'
Example response:

{ "startDate":"2011-05-23 17:53", "postData":null, "interval":5, "testId":54935, "detailedType":"get", "authPassword":null, "tag":"mon.itor.us", "authUsername":null, "params":{}, "type":"http", "url":"mon.itor.us", "locations":[{"id":1,"name":"US-MID", "checkInterval":5,"fullName":"US-MID"}], "name":"mon.itor.us_http", "sla":{},"match":1, "matchText":"Easy-to-use Monitoring as a Service>", "timeout":100 }
It will return the current URL test settings for the selected monitor. E.g. here it shows we are monitoring http://mon.itor.us url from US-MID monitoring location, using GET methods, at 5 min interval and also checking a for certain text on the page.

Get Server Performance Data

Format:

curl 'http://www.monitis.com/api?apikey=[Your API key]&action=testresult&testId=[4896]& day=[12]&month=[10]&year=[2010]&locationIds=[1,4]&timezone=[360]'
Example:

curl 'http://www.monitis.com/api?apikey=2KFGBIUO2HCFC24II109P39E3G& action=testresult&testId=[4896]&day=[12]&month=[10]&year=[2010]&locationIds=[1,4]&timezone=[360]'
Example response:

[
 {
 "id":7,
 "locationName":"DE",
 "trend":{
          "min":65.0,
         "okcount":1440,
         "max":3154.0,
          ”oksum":110721.0,
          "nokcount":1
         },
  "data":[
       ["2010-03-16 00:00",115.0,"OK"],
       ["2010-03-16 00:01",117.0,"OK"],
       . . .
       ["2010-03-16 23:58",0.0,"NOK"],
       ["2010-03-16 23:59",146.0,"OK"]
   ],
  "adddatas":[
       ["Connection lasted more than 10 seconds.",1]
             ]
  }
]

The result JSON object shows monitoring location, min and max performance values, number of OK results, number of failures (NOK). In the data section it should show measurements for each data-time stamp.

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Monitor your Windows Servers, Free!

Seb Kiureghian — Fri, 13 May 2011 22:07:32 +0000

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.

1. Login to Mon.itor.Us.
2. Go to Monitors>Add Monitor>Internal and hit next.

3. This is the Internal Monitoring Wizard. Select the Windows agent on the right. This will download Setup.exe.
4. Install the agent file. Once installed, you may log into the agent with your Mon.itor.Us login.

5. Once you’ve logged in, name the agent, click Register, and then Start Agent. You’ll see the agent log generates some information to show that the agent is running properly.
6. Log back into Mon.itor.Us and go back to the Internal Monitoring Wizard as you did in step 2.
7. Select the agent you’ve installed and the metrics you’d like to monitor. Set the thresholds for each metric, for example CPU <90%. Then click Add.
8. The monitors will be added to your dashboard as movable widgets.

The free internal monitors will do a check every 30 minutes, and there is currently no limit on how many you can add. The next post will go through a setup on Linux.

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Creating and Sharing Reports in Monitis. An Easy Task.

Seb Kiureghian — Wed, 09 Mar 2011 23:05:10 +0000

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.
There is the Outage report, which shows hourly performance between any two dates for a single monitor. This is useful because it compresses a large dataset into a manageable view, allowing you to see trends that you might otherwise miss. For example, if your site goes down every Saturday evening, the Outage report would show you.
We’ve recently added some Management Reports for Uptime, Performance, External SLA, Fullpage SLA, and Transactions SLA. These basically show how all your monitors have been doing for the last day, week and month in terms of uptime, response time, and meeting SLA objectives. We wanted to make sharing really easy for these reports, so you can email them to anyone with a click of a button.

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Check your site before you wreck your site. New Load Testing video.

Seb Kiureghian — Fri, 17 Dec 2010 22:49:00 +0000

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.

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New Video Highlights our Coolest Dashboard Features

Seb Kiureghian — Thu, 09 Sep 2010 23:05:15 +0000

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.

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New Video Tutorial on Traffic Monitoring… Track your Visitors

Seb Kiureghian — Thu, 02 Sep 2010 22:14:55 +0000

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.

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New Video Tutorial: Monitoring your Cloud… from the Cloud

Seb Kiureghian — Wed, 01 Sep 2010 01:05:23 +0000

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.

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New Video Tutorial: SNMP Monitoring as a Service

Seb Kiureghian — Sat, 28 Aug 2010 23:50:46 +0000

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.

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New Video Tutorials Pt.3, Internal Monitoring

Seb Kiureghian — Mon, 09 Aug 2010 10:10:54 +0000

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.

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