A rabbit?

Writing custom monitors for Monitis is easy. On monitisexchange you can find many examples for custom monitors. However, now I bring you a surprise.

It is only rarely after I write a piece of code and represent it to others that I feel like pulling a rabbit out of a hat. On this occasion – there is something even better than a rabbit!

I’m proud to present you this time with ‘Monitis Monitor Manager‘, or M3 (M³) in short.

As a sysadmin, you have learned — typically, from painful experience — that things can go horribly wrong when files or directories on your systems grow beyond your expectations. This is an area where monitoring can help. In this article, we’ll take a look at creating file and directory monitors, and using Monitis to track these monitors and alert you when the unexpected happens.

Did you know that you can use Monitis to monitor your critical applications such as Exchange?
Microsoft Exchange is a popular and powerful enterprise messaging platform and provides critical collaboration tools. It’s very popular with companies, and it is important to ensure that every aspect of the messaging infrastructure is working flawlessly. And you do that (rather, we do it for you) by monitoring the most important parameters.

Just add the following information to our recent trove of blog posts on ways to improve IT performance and administration via Monitis. So far, we’ve written a book full of posts on such topics as Cacti, SNMP, Monitis and what’s between them, adding Monitis website monitors using Excel, how to manage Monitis monitors with VBScript…the list goes on.

Did you know that, using VBScript and powerful Monitis API, you can not only create monitors and feed them with data, but you can also manage your monitors and retrieve information? This group of scripts allows you to perform some tasks without using the Web Console.

All scripts share a common configuration file where your API Key and Secret Key are stored. You can store your keys with the command:

cscript KeyManager.vbs /cmd:set /APIKey:3TE4KFEAJICQDKRANI3IPTBLQK /SecretKey:5CK8P2176A21Q9ARDDRGEWSAK

You can check that your key is correctly stored with the command:

cscript KeyManager.vbs /cmd:get

As a system administrator, you will often find yourself responsible for managing a wide range of operating systems.  Since many management tools are only available for a subset of the platforms, this means you may be forced to work with more management tools than you’d like.

Cross-platform tools, when you can find them, greatly simplify the job of keeping track of so many disparate systems.Monitis provides agents for Windows and Linux systems, with a number of built-in metrics.  But, in situations where those metrics aren’t enough, or when you need to support systems that don’t have an agent available, using custom monitors written in a cross-platform scripting language can provide consistency across all of your managed systems.  Python can provide just such a scripting language.  In this article, we’ll walk through an example of using Python to measure system load.

It’s time again to bulk up the muscles for the beach. But did you also know that you could add blocs of website monitors using the common, everyday and ordinary Microsoft Excel program?

Let’s say that you want to monitor a long list of websites and URLs with Monitis. Why would you want to do this? Well, you may want to monitor every page in your large website. Or, you may have a load of sites you need to manage for clients. Adding sites to monitor by bulk in just plain convenient!

This article will show you how easy it is to add several monitors in bulk to your Monitis account — quickly and easily running a script from your Windows desktop.

Okay. So, the key here is to assemble the names of the sites and their parameters that you’re targeting in a list in an Excel file. Then export the contents in CSV and let a script configure the monitors for you automatically. It’s that simple!