Online businesses can use this tool to mitigate losses from website downtime or interruptions of their online transaction services and processes

SAN JOSE, Calif., Dec 08, 2011 (BUSINESS WIRE) — Monitis(TM), the award-winning provider of a leading 100% cloud-based all-in-one monitoring platform, and part of the GFI Software family, today announced new Synthetic End-User Transaction Monitoring functionality within its free Monitor.us(TM) tool. This new capability enables online businesses to identify and address potential problems in their online business processes before they can have a negative impact on user experience and online revenue generation. Monitor.us helps reduce the cost of downtime that can result in thousands of dollars in missed revenue, which is especially critical during the holiday online shopping season.

Online businesses, particularly retailers, know the cost of website downtime and how this can affect their bottom line and their brand reputation. With multi-step processes such as shopping carts, registration forms, product searches and secure logins, businesses rely on a complex combination of multiple servers and Web services to carry out their day-to-day operations. If a retailer’s shopping cart process is broken and customers cannot complete the transaction to finalize purchases, that revenue is lost and is likely go to their competitors.

The Monitor.us Synthetic Transaction Monitoring tool checks the functionality of web applications on a regular basis by simulating an end user’s interaction with the website according to a pre-defined script. It monitors the entire online user experience using real browsers, and if any part of the process fails, it will take a snapshot of the error screen automatically, sending an alert to IT administrators and enabling them to fix the application before it impacts business.

Hovhannes Avoyan, General Manager at Monitis said, “Transaction Monitoring tools are typically very expensive products, only affordable for large organisations. However, the holiday shopping season is often just as critical to smaller online retailers who need to know their online stores are performing optimally. Monitis is committed to providing competitively priced and even free tools to businesses so they don’t miss out on sales this holiday season because their website was down.”

Transaction Monitoring within the Monitor.us platform is the world’s first free tool of its kind and enables one check per day, which is generally adequate for small businesses. Monitor.us users will also receive a 25% discount when upgrading to the premium Monitis Transaction Monitoring solution, which offers round-the-clock protection.

More information on Monitor.us Free Transaction Monitoring is available at http://synthetic.monitor.us/end-user-monitoring .

About Monitis

A leading provider of easy-to-use, pay-as-you-go, enterprise-class network and systems monitoring software as a service (SaaS) for IT support specialists. More than 80,000 users worldwide have chosen Monitis to increase uptime and user experience of their services and products. Their core product offerings include website monitoring, site load testing, transaction monitoring, application and database monitoring, cloud resource monitoring, and server and internal network monitoring. What makes Monitis’ software different is how fast it is to deploy, its flexible pricing and feature-rich technology that provides a comprehensive single-pane view of on-premise and off-premise infrastructure and applications. Monitis was acquired by GFI Software in October.

Copyright (C) 2011 GFI Software. All rights reserved. All trademarks used are owned by their respective companies. To the best of our knowledge, all details were correct at the time of publishing; this information is subject to change without notice

SOURCE: GFI Software

        GFI Software
        Please email David Kelleher on dkelleher@gfi.com
        GFI - Malta: Tel: +356 2205 2000; Cell: +356 7906 3606; Fax: +356 21382419 

http://www.monitis.com            or
        Davies Murphy Group
        Please email Brian Alberti on gfi@daviesmurphy.com
        Tel: 781-418-2403 

http://www.daviesmurphy.com

The addition of Monitis strongly positions GFI Software to solve the unprecedented
IT management challenges arising from the rapid adoption of cloud computing

Clearwater, Fla. – Oct. 25, 2011 – GFI Software today announced that it has acquired Monitis, the pioneer of cloud-based network and systems monitoring solutions. This acquisition further strengthens GFI’s ability to provide affordable end-to-end systems monitoring for small and medium-sized businesses (SMBs) and to be a one-stop shop for managing heterogeneous IT infrastructures, be they on-premise, hosted or in the cloud.

“Today’s acquisition shows our commitment to expanding our solutions, helping our customers succeed in the rapid uptake of cloud-based services,” said Walter Scott, CEO of GFI Software. “As more and more SMBs adopt cloud computing, GFI is diversifying its own product portfolio to ensure we continue delivering the technology that ensures our customers remain leaders in their fields. While cloud computing enables companies to cut costs and streamline operations, it adds an unprecedented layer of management challenges for which Monitis offers a great fit.”

Monitis specializes in cloud-based software and infrastructure monitoring. Its solutions provide time-pressed IT administrators and IT support companies with a complete infrastructure view. With Monitis, users can monitor, test and manage the performance of on-premise and off-premise infrastructure and applications.

More than 80,000 users worldwide rely on Monitis. More than 200,000 websites and cloud-based applications are monitored and maintained by Monitis services, with more than 40 million checks and records created each day.

“Joining GFI Software gives us the capital, expertise and business resources that will enable us to make our products stronger and invest in features and functions that will help our customers’ businesses grow,” said Hovhannes Avoyan, CEO of Monitis. “GFI is a leader in the network monitoring and management market in the SMB space, and our solutions strongly complement one another now and will be increasingly interconnected as cloud computing continues to grow.”

Following the acquisition, the business will continue operations under the Monitis brand and the solutions will continue to be available as free and paid services to customers worldwide. The senior leadership and management team that built Monitis will remain in place to continue driving new innovations in the company’s services.

The Monitis technology also will be integrated into the GFI MAX RemoteManagement™ platform for managed services providers (MSPs). This will enable MSPs and IT support companies to expand their managed services capabilities beyond traditional on-premise infrastructure to remotely monitor and manage their customers’ cloud-based solutions as well.

To learn more, visit www.gfi.com or portal.monitis.com, or send email to gfimax@gfi.com.

About Monitis

A leading provider of easy-to-use, pay-as-you-go, enterprise-class network and systems monitoring software as a service (SaaS) for IT support specialists. More than 80,000 users worldwide have chosen Monitis to increase uptime and user experience of their services and products. Their core product offerings include website monitoring, site load testing, transaction monitoring, application and database monitoring, cloud resource monitoring, and server and internal network monitoring. What makes Monitis’ software different is how fast it is to deploy, its flexible pricing and feature-rich technology that provides a comprehensive single-pane view of on-premise and off-premise infrastructure and applications.

About GFI Software

GFI Software provides web and mail security, archiving, backup and fax, networking and security software and hosted IT solutions for small and medium-sized businesses (SMB) via an extensive global partner community. GFI products are available either as on-premise solutions, in the cloud or as a hybrid of both delivery models. With award-winning technology, a competitive pricing strategy, and a strong focus on the unique requirements of SMEs, GFI satisfies the IT needs of organizations on a global scale. The company has offices in the United States, UK, Austria, Australia, Malta, Hong Kong, Philippines and Romania, which together support hundreds of thousands of installations worldwide. GFI is a channel-focused company with thousands of partners throughout the world and is also a Microsoft Gold Certified Partner.

For more information:

Please email David Kelleher on dkelleher@gfi.com

GFI – Malta: Tel: +356 2205 2000; Fax: +356 21382419.

URL: http://www.gfi.com.

Davies Murphy Group

Please email Brian Alberti on gfi@daviesmurphy.com

GFI – US: Tel: +1-781-418-2403

Copyright © 2011 GFI Software. All rights reserved. All trademarks used are owned by their respective companies. To the best of our knowledge, all details were correct at the time of publishing; this information is subject to change without notice.

There are times when you run out of SMS credits in your Monitis account. We always give you a heads up when this is about to happen and give you a grace period to refill, but we’ve just added SMS Auto-Credit to make this process even easier. Now you can set your SMS credits to refill automatically whenever you run out.

To use this optional service, go to Account>SMS Balance in your Monitis account, and check the Auto-Credit box. You’ll be able to select the number of SMS to purchase and a payment method. We will then add your SMS credits and email you a payment link for your desired amount. The SMS credits will be available immediately, before you complete payment, so you won’t miss an alert. You’ll still be able to purchase SMS credits on demand in the same place. And remember, SMS credits can be used for Automated Phone alerts as well. Each Phone alert takes 2 SMS credits.

Hi all. We made a change to our notification rules I thought you should know about. We’ve simplified them a bit. Here’s a screenshot of how they used to be

Notice how you have to select which monitoring locations you want to receive alerts for. We found that users sometimes changed their monitoring locations without remembering to select them in their notification rules. This caused some confusion, so we decided to simplify notification rules by removing the part where you select locations. From now on when adding a notification rule, you only need to specify the minimum number of failing locations required to trigger an alert.

Thischange is now live in all Monitis accounts. If you have any feedback please leave comments below or use the Feedback form in your account.

We’ve been working hard on new features between May and June 2011, so please take a look at what’s new at Monitis during that period.

LOCATION PERMISSIONS
To make things easier we changed our location permission approach. Before you had to explicitly specify our external locations to use and were bound to those locations. Now you specify only the maximal number of locations and are free to use and combine our external locations however you want.

GLOBAL TRACEROUTE SERVICE
We launched a new free tool, Online Visual Traceroute, which will enable system administrators and webmasters to instantly and simultaneously trace the Internet routes from testing locations across the U.S., Europe and Asia to their networks’ servers. The information can be viewed in a graph or table as well as via Google Maps. The Monitis Online Visual Traceroute is available to all visitors at http://traceroute.monitis.com

SPECIFYING A TIME ZONE IN YOUR PROFILE

We added a capability to explicitly specify your time zone in the profile. Once you set it up, all time related information in the dashboard, reports, alerts, etc., will be in accordance with your specified time zone. This is especially helpful if you travel and your actual time zone differs from the default time zone settings in your browser or PC. The time zone can be set under Account>Profile.

NEW PLAN BUILDER
We redesigned our Plan Builder to make it cleaner, easier and more user-friendly. We hope the new design will provide better insight into Monitis functionality and pricing and will eventually help to make better informed decisions.

API
We were very busy with API improvements in May – June 2011. More than 20 new functions were added and many more were updated following customers’ requests to make API usage easy and intuitive. You can find our detailed API reference at https://www.monitis.com/api/api.html
You can also find several useful articles on different scenarios of API usage in our blog. Here is a very short list:

Integrate Apache Monitoring into Monitis.com

Custom Monitors in Monitis with Python

Introduction to Perl interface for Monitis API

Monitoring files and directories with Monitis

Monitoring OS X with AppleScript and Monitis

Create Nagios Plugin Monitor on Monitis.com

OTHER IMPROVEMENTS
To keep this message short we’ll close with a list of brief descriptions of other changes

Uptime values in management reports now show two decimal places

Performance reports show results from a best-performing location

Internal http and ping monitors were added to emails reports

Dear Customers,

Yesterday our portal and dashboard went down for several hours, from about 10am to 4pm Pacific time due to a significant power outage at our Colo4 facility in Dallas, Texas. This is the first significant outage in our company’s history, and we were scrambling all day to get everything back to normal.

The good news is that even as the dashboard was inaccessible, monitoring from our global locations continued normally. The outage impacted our main infrastructure at that facility including our portal, dashboard, free service, load tester.

Looking forward we’re planning to avoid such kind even very unusual outages in future by replicating our main infrastructure in different datacenters around the globe.

We thank you for your patience and apologize for any inconvenience this caused.

Sincerely,

Monitis Team

This blog is on the 12th annual System Administrator Appreciation Day. Thank you, sysadmins for all your hard work, long hours and sleepless nights spent on deploying and maintaining servers and other IT infrastructure.

Many of us at Monitis started as sysadmins. It is a tough task. It’s like being a Swiss Army knife – you wear many hats and do various jobs around installing, configuring, securing servers and network infrastructure, among other things. Then, you are expected to keep the infrastructure running 24×7, which sometimes means coming to the office in the middle of the night.

To help sysadmins to automate some of these tasks, we started developing monitoring tools for them. We started with an external web site monitoring service that checks the availability and the response time of your website from multiple locations. Later we added more monitoring services for servers and applications.

Unfortunately, management types often don’t fully understand and appreciate the complexity of sysadmins’ jobs. At times, it is hard to explain the need for sysadmin tools and obtain budgets for them.

To help you with this task, we are announcing a System Administrator Appreciation Day special, a 50% of all of our sysadmin tools. Use SYS50 coupon code at checkout. We will be offering this discount from Thursday at Midnight PST through the weekend.

Sign up now at http://portal.monitis.com/index.php/plans/plan-builder

São Paulo, July 25, 2011– Monitis, the award-winning provider of the world’s first all-in-one cloud-based service that combines web site uptime, server and application monitoring, today announced the deployment of a new monitoring node in Brazil.

This will provide companies whose business relies on the Web, a complete and accurate performance picture from the perspective of both Brazilian and international web site visitors.

The addition of this node brings the total number of Monitis monitoring nodes operating around the world to 16.  Monitis’ nodes across the US, Canada, Europe, Asia, Australia and South America monitor clients’ key IT processes every 60 seconds – offering fast and frequent checks, as well as alert notifications into the health of servers, networks, applications, events, cloud storage facilities, cloud platforms, websites, transactions and other processes.

“We have been using Monitis service for more than two years now,” said Oliver Kuchendorf from Internet-Arts.  “It is very economical, easy to set up and start using.  Most importantly, it provides us a proactive way of detecting performance issues with the web sites we monitor, so we can provide high quality and uninterrupted service to our customers.  We are very excited about Monitis adding a new node in Brazil.  It shows commitment to businesses in our country, enabling us to detect and fix web site performance issues that our Brazilian customers may be experiencing even more accurately and quickly.”

“The addition of a new monitoring node in Brazil will enable us to expand our level of service to businesses with customers in Brazil,” said Monitis Founder and CEO Hovhannes Avoyan. “What really sets us apart from the competition is the frequency of monitoring. If a typical service offers monitoring “once a minute from 100 nodes”, in reality it means each node is activated every 100 minutes. In the current business environment, companies can’t afford such delays before discovering slowdowns or disruptions at a particular destination. With Monitis service, customers may choose one-minute monitoring intervals from all our monitoring locations simultaneously.”

In addition to offering clients a global network of monitoring stations, Monitis also enables IT managers to create their own customized monitoring locations using a small footprint agent.

“As more companies come to rely on proactive monitoring and instant notifications of IT problems, Monitis is committed to continuously expanding the network of monitoring nodes and raising the service bar higher,” added Avoyan.

The new monitoring location is provided by Ananke.

You can try Monitis service for free by signing up at https://www.monitis.com/free_signup.jsp

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 that is based 100% in the Cloud. Besides Monitis’ enthusiastic and loyal user base of 60,000 customers from small businesses to Fortune 500 companies to government agencies and educational institutions, Monitis has won rave reviews from the technology analyst community, such as ”Most Innovative Start-Up″ from The 451 Group and a listing in OnDemand 100, a ranking by Morgan Stanley, KPMG, and AlwaysOn, of 100 top private companies globally.

Monitis was founded in 2005 by a team of seasoned IT developers fed-up and tired of the limits of software-based tools, while inspired by the promise of the Cloud. Headquartered in San Jose, CA, Monitis’s team of IT professionals has extensive experience running enterprise-grade IT businesses, as well as starting and selling several IT start-ups. Monitis employs a global workforce and enjoys a robust average month-on-month revenue growth of over 10%.

For additional information please send us an e-mail to info@monitis.com or call 800-657-7949

For press inquiries, please contact press@monitis.com

MONTREAL, July 22, 2011– Monitis, the award-winning provider of the world’s first all-in-one cloud-based service that combines web site uptime, server and application monitoring, today announced the deployment of a new monitoring node in Canada.

This will provide companies whose business relies on the Web, a complete and accurate performance picture from the perspective of both Canadian and international web site visitors.

The addition of this node brings the total number of Monitis monitoring nodes operating around the world to 15.  Monitis’ nodes across the US, Canada, Europe, Asia, Australia and South America monitor clients’ key IT processes every 60 seconds – offering fast and frequent checks, as well as alert notifications into the health of servers, networks, applications, events, cloud storage facilities, cloud platforms, websites, transactions and other processes.

“We have been using Monitis service for more than two years now,” said Louis St-Jean, IT Director of LanauWeb Media.  “It is very economical, easy to set up and start using.  Most importantly, it provides us a proactive way of detecting performance issues with the web sites we monitor, so we can provide high quality and uninterrupted service to our customers.  We are very excited about Monitis adding a new node in Canada.  It shows commitment to businesses in our country, enabling us to detect and fix web site performance issues that our Canadian customers may be experiencing even more accurately and quickly.”

“The addition of a new monitoring node in Canada will enable us to expand our level of service to businesses with customers in Canada,” said Monitis Founder and CEO Hovhannes Avoyan. “What really sets us apart from the competition is the frequency of monitoring. If a typical service offers monitoring “once a minute from 100 nodes”, in reality it means each node is activated every 100 minutes. In the current business environment, companies can’t afford such delays before discovering slowdowns or disruptions at a particular destination. With Monitis service, customers may choose one-minute monitoring intervals from all our monitoring locations simultaneously.”

In addition to offering clients a global network of monitoring stations, Monitis also enables IT managers to create their own customized monitoring locations using a small footprint agent.

“As more companies come to rely on proactive monitoring and instant notifications of IT problems, Monitis is committed to continuously expanding the network of monitoring nodes and raising the service bar higher,” added Avoyan.

The new monitoring location is provided by GloboTech Communications.

You can try Monitis service for free by signing up at https://www.monitis.com/free_signup.jsp

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 that is based 100% in the Cloud. Besides Monitis’ enthusiastic and loyal user base of 60,000 customers from small businesses to Fortune 500 companies to government agencies and educational institutions, Monitis has won rave reviews from the technology analyst community, such as ”Most Innovative Start-Up″ from The 451 Group and a listing in OnDemand 100, a ranking by Morgan Stanley, KPMG, and AlwaysOn, of 100 top private companies globally.

Monitis was founded in 2005 by a team of seasoned IT developers fed-up and tired of the limits of software-based tools, while inspired by the promise of the Cloud. Headquartered in San Jose, CA, Monitis’s team of IT professionals has extensive experience running enterprise-grade IT businesses, as well as starting and selling several IT start-ups. Monitis employs a global workforce and enjoys a robust average month-on-month revenue growth of over 10%.

For additional information please send us an e-mail to info@monitis.com or call 800-657-7949

For press inquiries, please contact press@monitis.com

Mon.itor.us is our 100% free website and server monitoring service. It is unique among similar services in that it imposes no cap on the number of URL’s monitored. As a result, we have some users monitoring hundreds, even thousands of URL’s from one account, for free, forever. That’s great, but what if you want to upgrade to our premium service, Monitis? Until now, you had to set everything up from scratch, but we’ve decided to make it extremely easy with a new Upgrade Wizard. It walks you through easy steps that allow you to select the monitors you’d like to keep and/or add in your upgraded account.

The first step lets you select the external monitors you’d like to keep and specify how many additional ones you’ll need and their frequency. The monthly and annual price is reflected at the bottom of each step. The next 2 steps allow you to add fullpage, transaction, internal and cloud monitors to your account. The last step lets you select API access, specify your SMS alert needs and select a payment method and Bam, proceed to checkout.

The Wizard has been active for a day and we’ve received great feedback so far. I think the step-by-step approach is a huge improvement in User Experience over the previous Upgrade form, which showed a bunch of stuff in one window. If you have upgraded from Mon.itor.us to Monitis and have any thoughts on our upgrade process please comment.