San Jose, CA – February 19, 2010 – Monitis, the leading provider of 100% Cloud-based network and systems monitoring solutions, today announced the deployment of another monitoring node, this time in the Netherlands. This brings to 9 the number of Monitis monitoring nodes available worldwide, and the third in Europe along with the UK and Germany. This is in addition to Monitis’ exclusive ability to offer IT managers nodes from custom locations of their choosing.

What makes Monitis’ nodes so unique is their True One-Minute Monitoring. This means that each of Monitis’ 9 nodes is monitoring a client’s site every minute. This is not the case with most other companies that claim to offer one-minute monitoring, but instead only monitor once minute from one individual location, not from all of their nodes. If a monitoring service is offering 100 nodes, each node is typically only activated once every 100 minutes.

Hovhannes Avoyan, Monitis’ Founder and CEO, commented, “The Netherlands is of strategic importance for us, as so much of the European IT industry is based there. With this node and the others soon to be deployed across Europe, Monitis’ True One-Minute Monitoring is changing the game and setting a new standard.”

About Monitis All-in-One Monitoring Platform

Monitis is a 100% Cloud-based, complete, and flexible IT monitoring solution which consolidates backend, application, and cloud monitoring in an all-in-one, central 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.  More than 50,000 customers from small businesses to Fortune 500 companies to government agencies and educational institutions have chosen Monitis to reduce system downtime, improve the productivity of their IT staff, and reduce operational expenditures.

Monitis was founded in 2005 by a team of seasoned entrepreneurs and fed-up and worn-out developers who were tired of complaining about the limits of software-based tools, while inspired by the promise of the Cloud.  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 revenue growth of over 12%.

As we start the New Year, I want to take a quick look back to review some of the incredible milestones we’ve witnessed and orchestrated here at Monitis. We’ve watched the cloud industry expand and grow – with new cloud providers launching their platforms and a variety of new service providers bringing their brands and tools to the cloud.

Last year was an incredibly successful year for Monitis, as more and more companies making the move to the cloud relied upon our monitoring services (such as external monitoring, back-end monitoring, web traffic monitoring, transaction monitoring and EC2/S3 cloud monitoring.

We grew our customer base by 400% and our revenue by 500% last year. As you might guess, I’m ecstatic about those numbers, not just because it means we’re doing better, but because it represents growth for the whole industry, too. And I think it proves growing recognition by companies that accessing services, information and apps via the cloud – but safely – is the future of IT.

One of our biggest thrills this past year happened in November, at The 451 Group’s 4th Annual Client Conference in Boston. We competed with a group of other technology companies in the event’s “Innovators Showcase,” and we gave a presentation called “Monitoring in the Cloud: Monitor Anything from Anywhere.” We won! and we were named “Most Innovative Start-Up of 2009.”

2009 was also a year of continuous enhancements and innovations to our services. I’ll list them below, and as you read through these developments and click on the links to learn more detail, you’ll be able to chart just how far we’ve come in delivering state-of-the-art, cloud-based network and systems monitoring .

I’m very proud, and I’m grateful beyond words to you, our customers. I sincerely hope you’ll help us usher in a new year of enhancements and services that, I am certain, will help you grow and expand your own businesses. We’ve got some exciting things planned!

Our 2009 Milestones:

- Launch of ‘Top 10′ service – providing network and systems engineers with a holistic view of processes and applications that are consuming the most resources, enabling them to quickly diagnose or prevent problems and properly match IT infrastructure capacity to business needs.

- Launch of asset management as a service, which automatically creates inventory of software, logs usage patterns and proactively suggests optimization to help companies reduce IT cost.

- Announcement of remote monitoring of system events.

- Launch of performance testing as a service, enabling companies to instantly run site performance tests, as well as keep historical records and manage performance scripts.

- Launch of public reporting and widgets, features that enabled our customers to make their websites’ uptime statistics publicly available – for the benefit of their own customers.

- Launch of our cloud monitoring service

- The addition of a monitoring location in China – expanding our global coverage

- The addition of a new external monitoring location within Amazon EC2 cloud network, allowing customers of the cloud provider to check their users’ web experience locally.

- Tweet alerts for network failures on Twitter

- Management Information Base (MIB) browsing for MonitorSNMP. A MIB is a type of database used to manage the devices in a communications network and comprises a collection of objects in a virtual database used to manage a network’s routers and switches.

- Introduction of remote monitoring to work on the Sun’s Solaris platform

- A free links checker service to detect broken and dead-end website links and alert users

- An interface for command-line tools to help make IT folks more productive and efficient

- A web ecosystem visualization service called WebMap, which helps IT engineers and managers understand their networks better in terms of status, health and manageability.

- Monitis S3 Monitoring, an on-demand cloud storage and usage service, enabling customers to independently monitor Amazon S3, notifying them when they reach prescribed thresholds.

- Database performance management and load testing from the cloud.

- User-friendly enhancements, such as the ability to manage all external monitors from a single, central location, enabling customers to edit network settings, monitor timeouts, change monitoring locations, schedule maintenance, and schedule and set up notification rules for all monitors from a single place.

- A new scheduling feature for our on-demand load testing

- Special holiday pricing for e-commerce monitoring – to help prevent site downtime

- MonitorSNMP, an enterprise-grade SNMP network monitoring service available via the cloud

- A time-saving universal cloud monitoring framework that enables external and internal monitoring from all cloud-hosting providers including Rackspace Cloud, Amazon Web Services and GoGrid.

- The ability for customers to create custom, end-to-end locations for server monitoring locations

- A free service to instantly check website response times from different locations

- Enterprise-class options for system failure and performance outage notification management

At the Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas, virtual computing just got a bit greener.

NComputing, the virtual desktop makers, unveiled a low-cost, first-ever virtual desktop accessible via a USB. The company, which already claims about 2 million users of its line of Ethernet-based and PCI- based virtual desktops, said its new U170 model will sell for under $100.

NComputing says that its virtual desktops use as little as 1 watt of electricity (compared to 110 watts for a regular PC), helping companies save 90% on electricity bills. They also drastically reduce e-waste because they are tiny (access devices only weigh 150 grams, compared to 9.6 kilograms for a PC), and because they last much longer than PCs.

Here’s how a USB-enabled virtual desktop works:

- It plugs into a standard PC’s USB port

- NComputing’s virtualization software (included) enables another user (actually, up to nine other users) to share that PC

- The U170 has connections for additional users’ peripherals, including keyboard, monitor, and mouse.

Saving Money, Too

For many companies, virtual desktops save money because it allows them to avoiding buying more PCs and spending money on per-PC software licenses. Virtual computing also lowers operating expenses, not only in electricity costs but also because it eliminates the problem of PC obsolescence by reducing the number of PCs that need to be replaced regularly.

Along with the development of virtual desktops, the IT industry has also recently seen a new cloud-based desktop – where apps and data are stored in the cloud.

While both users and their companies still have a lot of adoption issues when it comes to virtual machines, due mostly out of concern for privacy of data and security, it’s great to see that corporate IT continues to strive for efficiencies and “greenness” via these tools.

We’ve just got another “plug” within the IT industry.

This time it comes from prolific plug-in makers collectd – a daemon that collects system performance statistics periodically and provides mechanisms to store the values in a variety of ways, for example in RRD files. collectd also has over 90 plugins which range from standard cases to very specialized and advanced topics.

Well, it seems that collectd has just released version 4.9 of their open source tool for collecting, transferring and storing system performance statistics, and within that new version they’ve created a special Perl-based, plug-in for our free, fully hosted and cloud-based web monitoring service, Mon.itor.us – called, aptly so, MonitorUs.

The plug-in queries statistics that Mon.itor.us produces, for example, on system usage or any end-user difficulties that may arise.

Now, you can add the plug-in to your admin area of your site, desktop or laptop.

Thanks, collectd, for joining us in our quest to make it easier for website owners to operate more safely and with more confidence!

Think giants of commerce and names like Amazon, Walmart and Expedia come up. Now, think how much those giants depend on the huge cloud computing infrastructure to be secure and reliable to keep their businesses running and in shape.

So, if you’re an IT person, you can imagine how serious a Distributed Denial of Service (DDoS) attack is to online commerce. Now, add the fact that it happened on the day before Christmas eve to those giants of commerce.

It appears that the attack was aimed at the servers of Neustar, which offers DNS services to many major companies under the name UltraDNS.

The attack started at 4:45 p.m. PST and lasted for about an hour. It was compounded by the fact that it also affected Amazon’s S3 and EC2 cloud services. A lot of web services rely on Amazon’s cloud infrastructure.

To Neustar’s credit, it reacted quickly and contained the damage to the Northern California area.

But again, here’s another instance of a breach in security resulting in cloud downtime. Needless to say, this latest instance isn’t a real confidence booster for companies considering switching data and applications to the cloud from internal systems.

Luckily, there are resources, such as monitoring services that website owners can turn to that will warn them of outages and other end-user issues. As our monitoring snapshots above show, Monitis’ cloud-based monitoring technology picked up the outage on both Walmart and Amazon. We quickly notified our customers of the problem, and they were able to notify their own customers and/or use alternate resources to give their customers access.

I predict that, in 2010, as demand grows for cloud computing, so will the need for 24/7 cloud-based monitoring of those systems. I’m already seeing evidence of it from my customers. 

Uh, oh!

Rackspace, a major cloud-computing provider, experienced a connectivity loss at its Dallas-Fort Worth, TX, data center for more than a half hour on the afternoon of Dec. 18^th. During that time, customers could not access business services at the data center.

Among the first to notice the outage was cloud-based monitoring service, Monitis, which also monitors the performance of such providers as Amazon, Google and GoGrid on behalf of clients.

Again, as I’ve said many times in this blog, I can’t stress the importance of having an independent means to monitor and verify your cloud services provider. I believe that we’ll get to a point in the not too distant future when downtime will be a rare occurrence – rarer than it is now.

But until then, if you’re a business on the web, you owe it to yourself to protect it via a monitoring system that can be done from anywhere in the world and round the clock – via the cloud – and then warn you when things start to go wrong (from the end-user experience).

Listen to what one company said upon learning of the Rackspace outage from its monitoring service: “I was very impressed with the alerting when Rackspace (our hosting provider) went down,” said Nigel Hanson of Trimble, a company that provides positioning solutions such as GPS and lasers to companies to be more productive. “Monitis told us exactly when the servers went offline, and exactly when the world could see them again. Thanks for making such a great product.”

Don’t let downtime and the resulting bad experiences that consumers and users encounter take you by surprise! Check out how 24/7 cloud-based monitoring of cloud providers can bring you peace of mind!

This week, as storms engulfed the East Coast, Amazon Web Services (AWS), the cloud-computing giant, lost power for six hours in one of its four availability zones – due to connectivity issues.

I read though that a monitoring firm – which both uses AWS and provides monitoring services to its customers using AWS – measured the outage more accurately than Amazon disclosed from multiple locations across the country (at 44 minutes and 42 or 44 seconds), depending on location.

Despite the downtime, observers gave Amazon points for its fast response. Maybe they were more forgiving due to the ‘act of God’ nature of the incident.

Interestingly, the monitoring service that tracked the outage said that since its customers were using Amazon and Rackspace and their own hardware so much more interchangeably, the risk of more failures was higher. Another point is the basic fact that interrupted Internet access is a far more common problem than AWS going down. So, cloud providers are in the same spot as when enterprises shifted from frame relay connections to Internet-based connectivity between sites.

That’s a good analogy.

I can certainly understand the fickle nature of weather – especially given the snows and storms of winter on the east coast of the U.S – and how that can affect service. But again, I have to say that cloud providers have to do a better job of making service uninterrupted and more stable if they want to convince more businesses to move from internal servers.

I was glad to see, too, that a cloud-based monitoring service tracked AWS’ downtime for its customers – and more accurately than AWS. That’s just one reason, among many, in which monitoring proves its value.

San Jose, CA – December 9, 2009 – Monitis, the leading provider of 100% Cloud-based network and systems monitoring solutions, today announced the launch of Website Instant Check, a free service to check website response times from different locations.

This free, simple, easy to use Website Check tool allows IT managers and system administrators to instantly check the availability of their websites and web page-load speeds from multiple locations worldwide outside of their servers’ network. Monitis’ Website Instant Check checks the following functions:

- it sends an HTTP request to your provided URL every 60 seconds from multiple checkpoints around the world.

- it checks Time to First Byte (TTFB), which is the amount of time it takes to deliver the first byte of the requested page to the browser. TTFB represents the confirmation that a website is responding;

- it then checks the full content load speed;

- it then completes the analysis by measuring the DNS resolution time, which measures the translation speed of a domain name into an IP address.

This tool can also be embedded as a widget in user websites and blogs.

According to Hovhannes Avoyan, Monitis’ Founder and CEO, “By helping clients maintain faster web page loads and an ever-improving user experience, the Website Instant Check is yet another in a myriad of small ways that Monitis is helping IT managers and system administrators to keep their companies as profitable and as efficient as possible.” The tool is located at http://portal.monitis.com/web/guest/check-website.

About Monitis All-in-One Monitoring Platform

Monitis is a 100% Cloud-based, complete, and flexible IT monitoring solution which consolidates backend, application, and cloud monitoring in an all-in-one, central 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.  More than 50,000 customers from small businesses to Fortune 500 companies to government agencies and educational institutions have chosen Monitis to reduce system downtime, improve the productivity of their IT staff, and reduce operational expenditures.

Monitis was founded in 2005 by a team of seasoned entrepreneurs and fed-up and worn-out developers who were tired of complaining about the limits of software-based tools, while inspired by the promise of the Cloud.  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 revenue 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

Press release

San Jose, CA – December 7, 2009 – Monitis, the leading provider of 100% Cloud-based network, server and application monitoring software as a service (SaaS), today announced yet another world-first: the ability for IT managers to create custom, end-to-end server monitoring locations for within the Monitis system.

The traditional Monitis offering has always included the ability to monitor servers’ availability and performance end-to-end from eight different geographic locations: US-East, US-West (recently added), US-Center, UK, Germany, China, Australia, and Central America.

With Monitis’ new Custom Server Monitoring Locations tool, IT managers and system administrators can now define for themselves where they want to monitor from. This ability to have monitoring that is highly geographically customizable is a tremendous asset for websites wanting to monitor and improve their load-time performance in targeted markets.

As with all Monitis products, set-up is easy and quick. Simply install a small internal agent, define an unlimited number of locations to monitor from, and you are off and running.

Hovhannes Avoyan, Monitis’ Founder and CEO, commented, “Custom Server Monitoring Locations is a simple idea, but one that will give an enormous about of power to IT managers. It’s another of the numerous ways that Monitis is changing the servers and network monitoring game.”

About Monitis All-in-One Monitoring Platform

Monitis (http://www.monitis.com) is a 100% Cloud-based, complete, and flexible IT monitoring solution which consolidates backend, application, and cloud monitoring in an all-in-one, central 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.  More than 50,000 customers from small businesses to Fortune 500 companies to government agencies and educational institutions have chosen Monitis to reduce system downtime, improve the productivity of their IT staff, and reduce operational expenditures.

Monitis was founded in 2005 by a team of seasoned entrepreneurs and fed-up and worn-out developers who were tired of complaining about the limits of software-based tools, while inspired by the promise of the Cloud.  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 revenue growth of over 12%.

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

San Jose, CA – November 24, 2009 – Monitis, the leading provider of affordable, easy-to-use, 100% Cloud-based, network and systems monitoring solutions, today announced a another major release in its crusade to save IT managers’ time - a Universal Cloud Monitoring Framework that enables external and internal monitoring from all Cloud hosting providers.

Until today, Monitis was providing monitoring only for Amazon’s EC2 and S3 services. With the release of its Universal Cloud Monitoring Framework, Monitis can now sync to other Cloud computing providers very quickly - from Rackspace, GoGrid, Softlayer, and more. Monitis’ Universal Cloud Monitoring Framework will automate monitoring in highly dynamic cloud environments, where customers’ servers maybe added and terminated according to the load by management software or manually.

Given this dynamism, setting up end-user experience monitoring can become a tedious, resource intensive and error-prone process. Monitis’ Universal Cloud Monitoring Framework automates the configuration of external monitoring and server monitoring tools every time a new installation is called for - saving IT managers and system administrators around the world enormous time and hassle.

In addition to saving IT managers’ time, Monitis’ Universal Cloud Monitoring Framework gives users the confidence that comes from using a 3^rd party tool to monitor Cloud infrastructure in an independent manner.  Even when Cloud computing providers provide some sort of monitoring, there is an inherent conflict of interest – as they are keen to show higher uptime. By providing a customized, independent audit of SLAs (service level agreements), Monitis’ Universal Cloud Monitoring Framework increases the credibility of Cloud computing providers claims, which ultimately benefits both users and the industry, as a whole.

“We are passionate about one thing: saving IT managers’ massive amounts of time. The release of our Universal Cloud Monitoring Framework does just that.” said Monitis’ Founder and CEO, Hovhannes Avoyan. “It is also the first sortie in our move to become the industry standard for monitoring from the Cloud. We are already far, far ahead of the rest of the competition, but watch this space - more exciting things are yet to come!”

About Monitis All-in-One Monitoring Platform

Monitis is the only service which provides Cloud 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 backend monitoring, application monitoring, website monitoring, and cloud monitoring in an all-in-one, central 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. Recently, because it’s Cloud-based monitoring helps companies reduce system downtime, improve the productivity of their IT staff, and reduce operational expenditures, Monitis was named the Most Innovative Start-up for 2009 by The 451 Group at their annual Client Conference.  

Monitis was founded in 2005 by a team of seasoned entrepreneurs and fed-up and worn-out developers who were tired of complaining about the limits of software-based tools, while inspired by the promise of the Cloud.  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 revenue 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