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.

Guest Post:

Hello I’m Rick Stivers, and I’m the Director of Network & IT Services for Schoolwires. Schoolwires provides strategic online communication, community-management and productivity solutions to the K-12 education market. Our core product is Centricity, which brings together robust and flexible website management, community management and web 2.0/social network capabilities in a single, user-centric solution.  We also deliver Schoolwires Synergy™, a digital file sharing solution, and Schoolwires Assist™, a service request solution. We currently work with nearly 1,000 districts, over 5,000 schools and over  5 million users across the nation.

 We currently provide four different hosting models.

- ASP Hosted at our Managed Facility through Expedient Communications

- Educational Service Agency Hosted at their own facilities which serve districts in their regions.

- Client Hosted – Self Hosted at School Districts on their own equipment

- Schoolwires Appliance – Schoolwires maintained equipment at School Districts.

Over the past year we have really pushed toward the cloud. We implemented an Enterprise VMware Architecture with High Availability, DRS, and VMotion. One benefit of this push was higher reliability on the hardware side and reduction of our server footprint.

We began working with Monitis roughly two years ago. At the time I was unhappy with the current solution I inherited. It was a solution which required our own server, and was not robust enough for the number of sites we needed to monitor. We did an exhausting search and were just not happy with what we were finding due to the number of sites we needed to monitor and the ROI for many solutions were not cost effective. I found Mon.itor.us, and immediately liked what I saw during the trial process. I really liked the fact that they provided a solution along the same model as ours (SaaS), and that it was priced very competitively. It could also scale to the number of sites we currently had (more than 1200) and where we expected to be in 3 years. The interface was also very user friendly and with the AJAX interfaces felt more like a desktop application than a web tool. The reports are very helpful, and really allow us to focus our attention on the lower performing sites. Monitis allows easy exporting of raw data. This has helped with productivity, because I can easily categorize reports based on hosting type and really pinpoint issues related to the location. I also liked that they were innovating and really willing to listen to feedback on feature requests. One of the real benefits of their solution is that it gives an independent view on our sites SLA numbers. Unlike software we load internally on our network and which increases our cost because it’s another server and application we need to manage.

Part of my job description requires that our sites maintain a certain SLA, and without Monitis this would be difficult to track and maintain. The downtime alerts are very accurate and allow us to respond quickly to service outages. We really value this partnership and will continue to work with Monitis to help improve their product and services. Thank you…

Rick Stivers, the Director of Network & IT Services for Schoolwires

So, you’ve migrated to the cloud, or at least you’re considering it, and now you want to employ a monitoring solution. Good decision.

After all, enterprise networks are getting more complex as globalization continues to rage – despite the recession. And outsourcing and the growth of wireless are expanding networks beyond their traditional reach. Consider, too, that IT departments are being asked to guarantee that applications and services run well across both private and public networks.

Beyond that, the rise and growth of virtualization and cloud computing makes the job of monitoring and troubleshooting all the components of a computing network even more of a challenge. Why? Because virtualization removes the hardware from the application and creates traffic more difficult to monitor and troubleshoot. And with cloud computing, apps are not housed on the existing enterprise infrastructure and instead reside over the public network. Because ownership of the issue is now shared between the IT staff and your cloud service provider, it makes it even more difficult to correctly identify and track down performance issues.

So the heat is on; and ratchets the pressure up a notch with CIOs demanding cost reduction and higher service levels. All in all, it means finding ways to work more efficiently and effectively. And the right network management tools will offer you the right mix of products that meet both your monitoring and management needs.

So what kinds of capabilities should you look for in a network management system? In this post, I’ll focus on the generalities, and then in subsequent posts, I’ll discuss specific vendors that might be useful to you.

First, because change is a constant, not only in business but in life, too, IT must keep the network up and running regardless of moves, additions and changes. While network management solutions were once built solely to manage devices, now they’re more complex because they have to manage new types of traffic – such as voice and streaming video which are very latency sensitive. Plus, now that private corporate networks are on the public Internet, there are new concerns that IT must be concerned about – such as traffic levels and security issues.

So, consequently, it’s important to consider solutions that can monitor:

- network traffic

- end-user activities

- applications

- networking protocols

- servers

- network hardware

- virtual machines

- protocols

- cloud platforms

You need these elements for a complete end-to-end picture of network health.

These individual elements are necessary for the whole because, too often, when there are performance problems, the network is the first to be blamed. In fact, the problem could just as easily be an application glitch or trouble with end-user activities. Monitoring provides IT with a more proactive rather than reactive approach – as it will help mitigate problems before they happen and reduce mean time between failures.

Right now, unfortunately, most enterprise IT network departments use many disparate tools to try and improve visibility. Plus, IT departments are too often structured into distinct organizations, and that only compounds the problem because information isn’t shared. For greater visibility, things must change, and IT groups must work to share information in order to be proactive.

Network management suites have expanded well beyond monitoring just devices, and this broader view helps networking engineers determine potential bottlenecks before they happen. Putting the right enterprise network management solution in place sheds light on the entire network and improves overall network stability and reliability.

At Monitis, our end-to-end monitoring system offers:

- True 1 min frequency monitoring simultaneously from multiple locations in America, Europe, Asia and Australia

- The ability to customize and set up your own monitoring locations

- No false alarms – failures verified across multiple locations

- Monitors websites, e-Mail servers, firewalls, VoIP, databases, Domain Name Servers, routers, Web Servers from end user perspective

- Supported protocols – HTTP, HTTPS, FTP, SMTP, POP3, IMAP, SSH, PING, TCP, UDP, SIP, MySQL, DNS.

- Internal server and network monitoring including CPU, Memory, Server Processes, Bandwidth, SNMP, telnet.

- Web page content check – specify string to be checked for existence/non-existence on web page

- WebMap view – see all your servers and web sites in the single map view