Very often we were receiving e-mails from our users stating that their server was down, but they didn’t get SMS notifications. After investigating these issues, it turned out that SMS accounts of those users were exhausted. To avoid such complains in future and to inform our users earlier regarding their SMS account usage, from now on the users will receive SMS from Monitis stating that they reached their available limit of SMS notifications, so if they want to continue receiving SMS notifications they need to refill(buy) additional SMS credits. Thus, you can avoid any unexpected downtimes by filling in quickly and on time your SMS account and continue receiving SMS notifications afterwards.

Probably the most wanted and requested feature is now already available.
The new notification management mechanism allows:

1. Notification contact assignment per check.
2. Specification of the time of the day you wish to receive an alert on.
3. Specification of the week days you wish to receive an alert on.
4. Specification of certain range during the week to receive an alert on.
5. Number of successive failures before an alert will be sent.
6. Selection of locations you wish the failures come from to receive an alert.

To be compliant with an old notification mechanism all your checks are currently set to be sent to your all active and confirmed contacts. You can change that by clicking on the Notification Rules button in the edit part of the External Monitor modules or the edit part of the corresponding contact in the Contact module.
Additional features will be available very soon.

Monitis Team is expanding its features list by adding 2 more new features. We’ll go briefly through those features and also describe some usage scenarios, which can be applied to your needs.

So let’s start with “String should NOT be present” feature, which was requested by many of our users. It is an extension of our content matching feature, which was already available, but only with “String should be present” option. You can create your own scripts(probably PHP), which will return some values after checking databases, applications, etc. Afterwards you can set up a check for your script URL and also specify an error string with “String should NOT be present” option. This way whenever something goes wrong in your database or application you will get an alert (because an error string would be present). Otherwise you will get OK results.

The next feature we want to introduce is SSL/TLS, which will provide the possibility to check your servers requiring encryption using SSL (Secure Sockets Layer)/TLS (Transport Layer Security). To enable this encryption you just need to select a protocol and check “Over SSL/TLS” option if it is enabled for your chosen protocol.

Monitis Team wants to inform you that in the scope of our optimization works the following changes are made in Monitis service.

1. We completely changed all tables to flash, to be more precisely that is contacts and snapshot modules, all the popups in My Tags, My Transactions sections and also all popups in Saved modules section. The rest of the tables were changed a few months ago.

2. The time it takes from the login to the appearance of active tab with its modules has been significantly decreased, it will be more visible for users with a verity of modules.

3. Unresponsive script message will not be shown anymore, due to JavaScript optimizations.

These are all ongoing works to boost up the performance and reliability of our service, so we’ll continue our improvements simultaneously with additions of new features.

Monitis Inc., a leading provider of global website and network monitoring services, offers 50% discount for its premium service Basic and Plus yearly plans. Offer is valid till the 7^th of January, 2008.

Websites availability becomes critically important to online shops during Christmas sales season as downtime may result in significant loss of revenues. According to Mon.itor.Us benchmarks research of websites under “Gifts” or “Christmas shopping”, “Top hotels”, “Restaurants” categories, throughout peak season demonstrated substantial downtime and poor user experience. For example, www.restaurants.co.uk that provides list of UK famous restaurants had been down almost 50% last week of November 2007. The same week www.visitbritain.us had performance problems showing only 71% uptime, and www.zonefreshdelivery.com being off for 51 hours. www.opodo.co.uk was not down, but showed slow average loading time, over 4 seconds.

Monitis on-line availability and performance monitoring service helps to discover, diagnose, predict and prevent website outages. By monitoring websites availability on 24 by 7 basis Monitis live performance metrics allow online retailers to keep persistent revenues by improving their website uptime and ensuring ultimate web user experience. The service notifies prior to the site emitting problems, even before web visitors notice it, thus helping to fix the issue before it affects their sales. Besides online shops, the other beneficiaries of high uptime during Christmas season are vacation travel providers, restaurants and hotel reservation sites.

Monitis holiday special offer covers two most popular Monitis plans – Basic and Plus. With immediate payment option the packages are available with 50% discount. In addition to current monitoring locations from US, UK and Panama new monitoring location from Germany will be added at no extra cost in January 2008. This limited time offer is valid till the 7^th of January 2008.

About Monitis

Monitis Inc. offers free (http://Mon.itor.Us) and premium (http://www.Monitis.com) web monitoring services. Companies and individuals use Monitis solutions to gain competitive advantage through efficient web marketing, sales and IT operations. The services offer complete web performance monitoring, error detection, alerts notification, detailed uptime and performance reports, real time snapshot views and web site traffic analysis. The company has large community of users and free and on-demand premium monitoring services and provides customized enterprise performance management solutions.

From now on the Tag attribute will be shown in e-mail notifications, so users with a lot of servers which are grouped by Tags, can find the server in question on Monitis dashboard more quickly.

We hope this will help our users to act more quicker to recover the server(s) in question which will lead to more higher uptime results.

Due to some issues related to the connection and availability of results from US location for some ports like SMTP default port(25), Tomcat default port(8080), we have decided to move our US location from our current server provider. (Go Daddy to other provider – Crucial Paradigm.) So starting from Sunday our previous US location IP (208.109.240.12) will be changed to 208.76.244.82. New server’s data center is located in Dallas, TX meaning that all the users which previously had no results available from US location in case of SMTP checks, starting from Sunday will have all that data available. The same is related to some ports such as 8080 and others.

From now on Australian users with ported numbers will be able to receive SMS notifications on their mobile phones. To enable ported number support they simply need to check the Ported Number parameter during addition of SMS contact.

Definition: The Ported number is the number which is moved from one operator to another under the ‘number portability’ system.

It is currently supported in several countries one of which is Australia. In future we’re planning to add this support for other countries so it will be widely used.

Now every plan offers a yearly subscription rate which provides 20 percent savings versus monthly subscriptions. For new subscribers we offer one month of free trial. Just click on the appropriate sign up button to check the yearly rate.

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Due to many requests from our users, we have added the option to select the format type of weekly summary reports(PDF attachment or html), from your accounts’ Options menu item. Now you can choose the format you wish.