Press release

San Jose, CA – June 23, 2010 - Monitis, the leading provider of the world’s first Cloud-based network and application monitoring suite, today announced another revolutionary advance in its technology. Monitis will be the first monitoring dashboard provider to switch from Flash to open-source HTML5 when displaying dynamic content in its web-based dashboard.  This switch makes Monitis’ interactive dashboard faster and more universally compatible.  

Given increasing concern surrounding the problems with Flash (battery drain, not open-source, and security vulnerabilities), Monitis was already sensitive to the issue. When results from a recent user survey showed that Monitis users want faster-loading, non-flash charts, Monitis realized that the time had come to make the switch.

As a SaaS provider of IT management, Monitis has always been committed to making its interface as fast and user-friendly as possible. The dashboard is instantly deployable, making getting up and running simple. Ajax pop-ups allow users to perform management tasks quickly without loading multiple web pages.  With the new open-source HTML5 charts will load much faster and contain more interactive features. These new charts will be based on open-source Flot, a pure JavaScript plotting library for jQuery.

Said CEO Hovhannes Avoyan, “Liberating IT manager’s time. That is our single-minded focus. Our move to open-source HTML5 is solely about this. While the move saves our users’ time by loading faster in the short-run, HTML5 will also save them time in the long-run by being open-source and more secure than Flash. That we are the first to move to HTML5, well, that’s just par for the course for us.”

About Monitis All-in-One Monitoring Platform

Monitis is the only service that provides Systems Monitoring from the Cloud.  It is leading a new era of systems management tools – the Cloud generation.  Monitis is a 100% Cloud-based, complete, and flexible IT monitoring solution, offered on a Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) model.

Monitis consolidates back-end monitoring, application monitoring, website monitoring, and cloud monitoring in an all-in-one, hosted monitoring service. The platform is easily customizable and may be used for managing of all kinds of IT assets such as websites, servers, routers, switches, VoIP devices, DNS, databases, processes and any other IP devices.  Monitis provides users with a comprehensive view of their system’s health and performance. 

About Monitis

Monitis believes that the Cloud is the biggest thing to happen in IT management since IT management. Having seen this vision early, Monitis is now the global leader in developing this market.  It is the first affordable network and systems monitoring solution based 100% in the Cloud. 

Besides Monitis’ enthusiastic and loyal user base of 50,000 customers from small businesses to Fortune 500 companies to government agencies and educational institutions, Monitis has won rave reviews from the technology analyst community. These accolades include:

• Being named as the “Most Innovative Start-Up for 2009″ by industry analyst The 451 Group at their annual client conference in December 2009.
• Being ranked among the 2010 OnDemand 100 in April 2010. The OnDemand 100 is a ranking by Morgan Stanley, KPMG, and AlwaysOn of the world’s top 100 private companies.

Headquartered in San Jose, CA, Monitis is lead by a team of IT professionals with deep experience running enterprise-grade IT businesses, as well as starting and selling several IT start-ups.  Using a global workforce, particularly its R&D team based in Yerevan, Armenia, Monitis is poised to move from strength to strength.  At present, it has a loyal and enthusiastic user community of 50,000, and an average month-on-month growth of over 10%.

Contact:
Monitis Inc.
Sales & Marketing Department
info@monitis.com
http://www.monitis.com
US & Canada Toll Free: +1-800-657-7949
UK + International: +44-845-527-3346
France + International: +33-48-607-9035
2880 Zanker Road Suite 203
San Jose, CA-95134
USA

I have a new whitepaper that I want the world to know about.  I’m pretty proud of my new baby; it’s called “Monitoring from the Cloud: Monitis versus In-House Monitoring Software.” As you can guess by the title, I pretty much prove why it’s better to monitor your apps, servers, networks and such via cloud-based monitoring technology versus in-house monitoring software.

To be frank, cloud-based monitoring like Monitis is superior over in-house (even open-source) software because it’s:

• has robust notifications and alerts (which you’ll miss if, again, your network, email server, firewall or router is down)
• is quick and easy to set up (10 minutes, tops versus weeks to months for open-source because you have to set up a dedicated server, database and the actual software)
• got low cost of entry, total cost of ownership (TCO) and maintenance (no dedicated main or back-up servers required ($2,000+ each), no server electricity costs ($1,000-plus yearly), plus no team of IT people required to update the software, as Monitis is updated automatically and is available for all to use)
• allows monitoring from outside your company via a network of global servers versus in-house software’s ability to monitor only within a firewall
• easily scalable to suit your growing computing needs, while in-house (open source) software often fails for any enterprise using over 100+ servers
• “green,” as you don’t burn up thousands of watts of energy via servers and create an ugly, giant carbon footprint
• “cool,” which means we use cool technology such as the cloud and Web 2.0 tools and widgets and so much more.

Like I said, I’m proud as a new parent of my whitepaper, and if you care to have a deeper look, check out this link!

SIGN UP TO MONITIS NOW!!! CLICK HERE

Last week I read an interesting article by Jabulani Leffall about the top IT security issues causing sleep-deprivation at University IT departments.    Among the top 10 were 1. Securing remote access, 3. Patching systems, 6. Network use monitoring, 8. Password management and administrative access, and 10. Monitoring system logs.

In all these case, using cloud-based monitoring has advantages over open source.  With Nagios or other open source products, you need to make frequent exceptions to your firewall to configure server monitors and also to make the Nagios dashboard accessible from outside your firewall.  With a SaaS like Monitis, you don’t need to touch your firewall because all data is pushed to the cloud via HTTPS and the dashboard is hosted on our servers, not yours.

Regarding patches, we echo the sentiment that they are a major downside of Nagios and software in general.  They reduce productivity and are a pain.  With Monitis, there are no patches or upgrades to worry about.  All product improvements are released seamlessly without your involvement, even for internal agents.

Password Management and administrative access are doable with open source, but not nearly as simple as in a SaaS, which lets you control user privileges from anywhere.

Monitoring of network use and system logs is possible with both solutions, but here’s where reliability makes a huge difference between cloud-based and open source.  Nagios usually runs on just one server within your firewall, making your entire system vulnerable to the problems of that one server.  If that server goes down you won’t receive critical notifications about your network use or system events. With Monitis, you have not just one server, but an entire monitoring network, so you can rest assured that we will notify you even when your entire network goes down.

There are often concerns about storing proprietary data on cloud servers.  These are legitimate concerns, especially for applications with confidential data like customers, students’ test scores, email, and health records.   Monitoring data shows the performance of servers, websites and applications like Moodle or Blackboard, which is far less confidential.  I think that explains why universities are showing increasing interest in cloud-based products, particularly in monitoring.

Cloud computing and virtualization are presenting IT managers with greater challenges than ever before. For one, things are far more dynamic and complex these days – for example, with virtualized and multi-vendor data center environments and composite apps to look after.

Enterprises are increasingly in need of easy-to-use and integrated IT management solutions. I know that on the monitoring side of things, I see this increasing demand on a daily basis. For companies that are cloud computing, as well as for those who are operating virtualized networks, it’s simply not enough anymore to use limited tools that manage things on a piecemeal basis. What’s needed are tools that work across all environments…virtual, internal server-based and those on the cloud.

That’s one reason why you’ll keep seeing IT management software companies needing to issue upgrades to their products. For example, SolarWinds has just introduced the latest release of its enterprise network management solution — SolarWinds Orion Network Performance Monitor (NPM). The new version, #10, according to a press release I read, includes new modules for companies to enhance control and visibility across the entire IT infrastructure.

Pricing for the new version starts at $2,475 per 100 elements (the largest number of network devices or interfaces). Yes, that’s right — $2,475!

This is what makes cloud-based performance monitoring so beautiful. Because monitoring is done from the cloud in a Software as a Service (SaaS) model, the solution is continuously and automatically updated with new features, relieving IT staff of the tedious job of upgrading…and paying dearly for those upgrades, too.

There are multiple pricing options for monitoring starting from a few dollars/month. And, in addition, cloud-based monitoring, such as the service offered by Monitis, also allows IT pros to pay as they go. So, if you don’t fully utilize all the elements of monitoring, you don’t have to pay for it.

When you’re making choices for IT management solutions, weigh all the factors for performance monitoring tools that are part of the package.

Time. It flies. Don’t waste it. It’s money.

We all know these platitudes about the value of time and that we should be good stewards of our minutes and hours, but in the IT world, it’s pretty difficult to keep ahead of the clock.

And when it comes to the monitoring of networks, systems and websites, IT pros must often remain stuck on-site monitoring mundane and semi-automated processes that seem to take forever. Because most monitoring solutions are software-based, they require IT staff to be present – sometimes even when it’s time to go to bed.

I know this first-hand; I used to be one of them when I worked for Lycos/Europe. Missed many a dance recital for my kids, and got lots of complaints from my wife.

Now, Monitis has published a new whitepaper that outlines how cloud-based monitoring can free IT staff from both the mundane and wasteful. The paper, “Liberating Time, How Cloud-based Monitoring is Transforming IT Manager Productivity,” shows how Monitis “transformed the market by being the first monitoring company to fully integrate systems, network, and website monitoring into an all-in-one, comprehensive suite of tools that is available entirely from the Cloud.” As a result, IT managers are now free to monitor anything from anywhere, and are no longer stuck in the office.

Unlike other monitoring systems, which requiring IT managers to purchase and stitch together a variety of software-based tools that can take weeks or months to install and require regular updates (ugh!), the Monitis solution is an all-in-one, integrated suite of tools. What that means is that you don’t need to worry about how your tools play with others, because the solution is built to house as much or as little as you need.

The advantages of an all-in-one, customizable suite of tools include:

External Services Monitoring Tools – for monitoring websites, fileservers, mail servers, VoIP, and databases from the end-user’s point of view.

Server Monitoring Tools – which monitors all aspects of your CPU, memory, processes, and storage, and can be done on Linux, Windows, FreeBSD, and Solaris.

Network Monitoring Tools– a comprehensive suite of SNMP, ping, http, ssh, and network discovery tools.

Transaction Monitoring Tools – a scenario-based suite of tools able to track multi-step applications through real web browsers (e.g IE or Firefox). Behavioral scripts (or paths) are created to simulate an action or path that a customer or end-user would take on a site and ensure that e-commerce sites do what they are meant to do – make you money.

Cloud Monitoring Tools – which monitor instances, automation, usages and give you third-party verification of your SLA with Amazon (EC2, S3), Rackspace, GoGrid, or any other Cloud provider.

Web-Traffic Monitoring Tools – which offer in-depth insight into where your visitors are coming from, where they are going to, and how they got there.

Application Monitoring Tools – which enables monitoring of any Java-based service with JMX hooks – and from the Cloud. This means that users, in addition to monitoring, troubleshooting, diagnosing root causes, and pro-actively planning inside a production Java (also JRuby) application that’s deployed in a cloud or in a datacenter, can monitor these processes from anywhere at any time.

The best thing about all these features is that their automated and they free up IT managers from their endless list of manual tasks. No more sleepless nights and complaining spouses. Look for more about the advantages of cloud monitoring in my next post. I’ll run through how it can specifically save IT staff time and your company money. Need more facts? Please read a recent Monitis review at Google Apps Marketplace by Danny O.:

“Before finding Monitis I was using a couple open source tools including Nagios and grew frustrated with two things: 1. It wasn’t scalable enough to monitor our 300+websites, and 2. Required hours of configuration.
With Monitis, within a half hour of signing up we were able to monitor all our websites as well as 15 servers and a web-based application. It’s a one of a kind service and I highly recommend it to anyone. ”

Everybody wants low- or lower-cost computing these days. Add being a good citizen to that list – in terms of being environmentally responsible and greener computing. What you’ve got is a good argument for cloud-based internal monitoring – even more so than using open-source monitoring – which is, in at least some sense, free.

Let me explain.

So, if you want to run Nagios, Zabbix or a similar free and open-source product, you need a server. Nagios, which uses CPU very intensively (due to its architecture) needs quite a robust server – one with plenty of muscle. Now, a typical server could eat up between 0.5 to several kilowatts. If you figure in the cooling costs, UPS and other equipment, let’s safely assume that that server will use 1 kilowatt.

That translates to 24 kilowatt hours (kWh) per day, or 672 kWh per month – for a grand total of 8,760 kWh per year.

Let’s do a bit more figuring here because we’re not done totaling up the costs. Research from the Department of Energy shows that the average cost of residential electricity was 12 cents per kilowatt hour in the U.S. in April 2009, and ranged from 7 cents in frozen North Dakota to 26 cents in air conditioner-dependent Hawaii.So, from this little figuring, let’s make some quick calculations:

8,760 kilowatts X 12 cents = $1,051.20.

That’s the amount of your electricity costs for running one server per year.

A More Cost-Effective, Greener Way

Now let’s look at another more cost-effective way of internal monitoring.

Monitis’ Basic plan costs $98 per year, and Monitis Plus plan costs $384 per year. Neither requires you to have a server in-house. Plus, Monitis barely makes a carbon shadow, never mind a footprint. Monitis’ tiny internal monitoring agent can be co-located on any server within an enterprise data center.

What we’ve looked at so far are infrastructure costs for the two ways of internal monitoring. But we haven’t even yet considered the labor costs to your organization that comes with traditional server-based, open-source monitoring. That typically involves weeks of system set-up time and many hours of maintenance efforts for chores like patching, updating and configuring open-source software. With Monitis’ quick set-up feature, you don’t even need to consider those costs.

Let’s not forget server depreciation costs, too, which will depend on the scope of your IT needs and computing efforts. For a large organization, we’re talking quite a considerable sum.

You may have expected me to say this, but I recommend cloud-based monitoring. But don’t take my word for it. Consider the total cost of ownership (TCO) alone.

For more on cloud-based monitoring versus open-source software, check out an additional blog post on Monitis.

These days, IT is under growing demand to do more with less. And in the case of servers, their uses, requirements and complexity have all increased dramatically (just think about the constant work involved in upgrading operating systems (OSs), or the labor involved in maintaining server clusters around the world).

That’s why, today, the server monitoring is more important than ever, too. But in these times of limited resources, IT administrators need a solution that dramatically streamlines the time and work that’s required to monitor and administer servers.

Key Solutions

Automating monitoring is one way that IT staff can safeguard an ever-growing number of servers while working with limited resources. Automated monitoring should be easy to install, maintain and customize. A few of the features to look for:

- remote monitoring, allowing an administrator in Chicago to get reports and alerts on servers around the world,

- automated alerts, including pager, cell phone, e-mail, SMS, IM – even Twitter, which give administrators a “heads up” in case of an outage.

- 24×7 monitoring, which automatically plots server statistics and then measures them against user-defined thresholds. And when those thresholds are exceeded, the monitoring tool sends out automatic alerts through a menu of notification options (see above).

- Easy and Fast deployment. You should aim for automation that can be deployed in hours, compared with traditional monitoring solutions that require long deployment times over many months. And if you want fast, nothing beats the Cloud (e.g. see our blog Consider the Cloud When Choosing Network Management and Monitoring). With Software as a Service (SaaS) monitoring solutions housed on the cloud, such as the system offered by Monitis, you don’t need to worry about upgrades, server maintenance, and compatibility issues.

- Easy customization. Look for intuitive yet powerful features that make it is easy to adapt to the unique, fast changing, demands of your business.

Appeal to small, mid-sized companies

Automated monitoring solutions are also perfect for many small or mid-sized companies who lack platform-specific, silo-centric specialists and with very limited IT budgets. Yes, there are individual solutions that monitor a specific type of server, but installing, maintaining, and managing multiple monitoring solutions can be very complex and costly.

For example, a 2010 poll from Salaries.com found that database administrators earned up to $119,500, Senior Network Administrators $121,000, Unix Administrators $119.600 and Senior Project Managers up to $137,200, among others.

That’s why growing companies often opt for SaaS and cloud-based monitoring solutions. With their pay-as-you-go structure pricing structure, it’s simply more affordable to monitor servers, transactions and applications end-to-end.

But the appeal of automated monitoring is not limited to smaller firms. Big firms with heterogeneous IT needs, those operating multiple kinds of servers (from those based in Windows, Linux, UNIX, Netware, BSD, and more), are opting for comprehensive, platform-agnostic all-in-one monitoring solutions that can be used to monitor every type of server and OS in their organizations.

In my next post on today’s changing server environment and why it’s important to choose the right monitoring service, I’ll talk about such topics as monitoring SLAs, virtual servers and more. Stay tuned!

Cacti is a network graphing solution that features data storage and graphing functionality, and it is useful for everything from LAN-sized installations up to complex networks with hundreds of devices. And Nagios is a monitoring system that enables organizations to identify and resolve IT infrastructure problems.

Many companies have integrated use of both of these open-source services. But only one solution is really necessary for both functionalities — Monitis. Plus, while Monitis’ all-in-one, external and internal suite of monitoring tools matches or exceeds any competitor, function for function, there is one critical thing Monitis does that no one else does: monitor everything 100% from the Cloud.

Why is that a good thing? Because by being 100% Cloud-based, we save our clients time…levels of time that they’d never before imagined. What would you do with your free time if you no longer had to manage product updates, maintain your monitoring servers and, as a result, were able to go home on time and have dinner at a normal hour?

Here are some benefits of integrating Cacti and Nagios (not really, rather, using Monitis) without the hassle. You get:

• Monitoring for the cloud and data center
• Multiple clouds, multiple private data centers – one dashboard
• Fault detection, alerting, diagnostics
• Data visualization
• Management tools – tags, colors, sorting, users
• Monitoring from outside and inside of corporate firewalls

Instant data visualization

Monitis provides you with interactive graphs of all the data you need to study to improve your customers’ website experience.

Our graphing feature is pre-loaded with useful default graphs, such as average ping latency on all your servers, or you can navigate through all your data on a per-server basis with the data browser. You can save graphing templates for later viewing, export graphs as images, and overlay or stack multiple data sets.

Monitor your entire infrastructure – and fast

With Monitis, because we’re cloud-based, there’s nothing to download, compile, or configure. And you never need to worry about updates. Monitis tracks the performance of such major cloud providers as Amazon Web Service, and with our Universal Cloud Monitoring Framework, we can sync to other Cloud computing providers very quickly – from Rackspace, GoGrid, Softlayer, and more. Monitis is very easy to set up, and you can start watching all of your servers, networks and applications in a matter of minutes. All you need to do is select what services you want to check, choose what servers you want to check, choose what addresses to alert when a check fails, and hit save. Once your monitor is saved, Monitis will start keeping an eye on your servers, collecting data for diagnostics and graphs, and alerting you when something goes wrong.

We Grow with You

Monitis is designed to work on the cloud, and it’s completely elastic.

It works like this:

• You create a monitor, using a query to target a specific tag or provider
• Monitis starts monitoring based on your query
• Any time a new server comes online that matches your query, Monitis automatically starts monitoring it

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.

In my last post on choosing the best monitoring system, I talked about what good network, cloud and website monitoring systems should offer, for example, information on network traffic, end-user activities, apps, virtual machines and cloud platforms themselves.

In this post, I’d like to get into the different types of vendors and the solutions that they offer.

Let’s start with solutions from large IT vendors. You should easily recognize the names: eHealth and Spectrum from CA, IBM’s Tivoli NetCool, HP’s Network Node Manager, Ionix/Smarts from EMC, and CiscoWorks from Cisco. These solutions are like commodities – they’re widely available, and because of their large portfolio of products and services are very successful in giant, global companies. Here’s a quick rundown on both their shiny and dark sides:

ISVs – ISV solutions (Solarwinds, WhatstUp Gold) work for organizations of all sizes. Here are the pros and cons:

Open Source – Some of the more prominent network management solutions include: Cacti, GroundWorks, Nagios, OpenNMS, Zabbix, Zenoss, and Wireshark. Open source network management first became popular with companies on limited IT budgets, but they’ve since evolved, and their appeal has broadened with improved user interfaces and support services. Here are some pros and cons:

Appliance – Appliance solutions are dedicated hardware devices (for example ServerCheck) with hardened operating systems and software optimized to collect and analyze huge volumes of data at a very detailed level. Here are some things to consider for appliance solutions:

Cloud-based SaaS – Cloud-based solutions such as those from Monitis combine a low-cost of entry with ease-of-use, while still providing enterprise-wide visibility and scalability. Also unique to Monitis is its community: Monitis is in constant contact with customers, and developers are alerted early to the problems a new technology may pose and are able to incorporate changes into the product roadmap to accommodate them.

IT organizations seeking to improve operational efficiency and network visibility should carefully choose their tools and consider new cloud-generation vendors such as Monitis that offer broad capabilities coupled with flexibility, agility, and a strong, supporting user community.