Perhaps you’ve caught our series of blogs about NoSQL database storage tools?! Monitis has begun providing guidance on picking the right tool to match your company’s IT computing needs. In our previous blog post on NoSQL, we offered a comprehensive overview of Apache Cassandra – one of the many (currently there’s more than 100 popular solutions out there) NoSQL tools available.

Today, we’ll take a look at Apache HBase – originally created for use with Apache’s Hadoop, a software framework that supports data-intensive distributed applications under a free license.

Our mission in these posts is simply to help you choose the best NoSQL DBSs – most of which are open-source and cost-free. After all, you want to make sure that your data is being stored safely. Aren’t there enough worries out there about data security – whether the data is being stored on the cloud or behind your internal, private firewall?

Gosh; there are so many NoSQL database storage tools out there. It’s almost as bad as brands of sport drinks or water. Have you noticed that some mega-supermarkets have whole aisles dedicated to what we drink!

As an IT system administrator or manager, it’s sometimes very hard to compare various NoSQL tools. It involves considering your special computing needs, matching them to what is out there, aligning what’s right for your organization and then make the right decision!

That’s why Monitis, the first hosted all-in-one network and systems performance monitoring service for sysadmins, is publishing a series of blogs that are meant to offer a comprehensive guide to NoSQL technology and brands. We want to help you make the right choice that fits the particular needs of your company.

Why should we care, you may ask yourself? Increasingly, our clients, who depend on our ability to monitor servers and networks and a host of other key metrics 24/7 from the cloud, want our advice, too, on what kind of scalable and robust database technology to use. So, we’re obliging!

Here, in a series of blogs, we’ll present research on existing popular NoSQL data storage tools that are generally intended to store unprecedented large amounts of data, offer flexible and horizontal scalability and provide blazing-fast processing queries. We’ll also get down to the nitty-gritty and compare several well-known NoSQL DBs…such as Cassandra, MongoDB, CouchDB, Redis, Riak, HBase and others.

In this first post, let’s discuss the reason why NoSQL technology is important.

A network sniffer (also known as a network analyzer, protocol analyzer or packet analyzer) is a software or hardware tool that can intercept and log traffic on a digital network.

As data flows across the network, the sniffer captures each packet and, if necessary, decode the packet’s raw data. Once captured the sniffer can produce the values of various fields, analyze its content and flag potentially anything potentially malicious as defined by the system administrator’s specifications or security best practices.

The functionality of protocol analyzers vary in several ways including their ability to display data in multiple views, automatically detect errors, determine an error’s root cause, generation of timing diagrams, etc.

Besides analyzing input, certain protocol analyzers can also generate output for testing purposes, that can be fed back to the device being analyzed. In this way, the device can be checked for functionality and if it recovers gracefully from errors in the protocol.

Today we are launching something that we think is truly groundbreaking: Free Internal Monitoring. Now users of Mon.itor.Us, the free Monitis, can download our internal agents into Windows and Linux servers and monitor CPU, Memory, Disk, Load Average, MySQL, Processes, HTTP, Ping, and even SNMP, for free. Best of all, since we are a hosted service, all the performance data gets pushed to our cloud and you can access/manage it from anywhere. We hope IT Managers will enjoy free usage of software that’s typically very expensive. Here’s how to get started on a Windows machine.

Introduction

Cloud computing is a type of computing based on sharing computing resources rather than employing local servers or personal devices to handle applications. Corporate data centers, in particular, like Cloud computing as it enables IT to operate like the Internet.

Cloud computing advantages include:

• Lower cost of capital investments
• Much faster solution implementation
• Energy cost savings.

However, safely and securely managing clouds is an issue that has yet to be fully addressed and will be a major challenge for the government. The next cloud challenge: how will agencies monitor performance, administer access and track issues in a consistent manner that produces cloud benefits, while enabling management tools that do not restrict or dampen innovation.

Here at Monitis, it’s our ultimate goal to make the life of sysadmins, webmasters and other IT pros easier – especially when it comes to monitoring networks, servers, apps, cloud platforms and other key IT processes.

That’s why, in this post, we’re offering guidance on how you can deploy the Monitis monitoring agent and configure it using Puppet, the open source configuration management system. If you already use Puppet, go straight to the section below called “Distributing the Monitis Agent Using Puppet.” If you are not using any system configuration management yet, then we invite you to read this entire post for a brief introduction.

IT pros the world over wouldn’t be caught dead without server management software because it takes so much of the manual burden off managing servers and other critical applications.  Server management is required to to enhance the up-time of servers. Based on the server system, management plans may vary. Yet the bottom line is that proper server management software will guarantee the security and stability of servers throughout its lifespan.

Being huge machines, physical servers occupy both space and power.  Further, servers need cooling systems to keep them functioning. However, as the virtualization of servers becomes more popular, companies aren’t focusing much on physical servers. Virtualizing servers helps in reducing time, investment and energy expenditures, and they also reduce the cooling costs of servers.

Hosted server monitoring solutions like Monitis save enormous amounts of time for system and network admins, as cloudware enables you to get things done much faster and cheaper than by installing software products in-house. I’ve already covered the benefits of multi-tenant web solutions versus software solutions in my blog post Why Cloud-based Monitoring is more reliable and secure than Nagios, and we have also covered it in our white paper – Monitoring from the Cloud:  Monitis versus In-House Monitoring Software. By the way, I urge you to read them both.

But if you’re still interested in software solutions for some reason, below are a review of the popular server management software products: