Monitoring your site’s uptime is important, but it’s just as important to know the cause of downtime. That’s why Monitis offers internal monitoring, so you can know which processes on your server crashed before your site went down. Traffic monitoring also gives you insight into your website’s performance by allowing you to correlate the number of website visitors to response time. There are lots of tools available for monitoring traffic, but it’s harder to see their numbers side by side with monitoring data. Our new tutorial shows how to set up and view a traffic monitor. To view this and other tutorials or request a live demo, check our Demo page, and subscribe to our Youtube channel.

To get started, simply go to Add Monitor>Traffic Monitor, enter the URL you’d like to track visits for, and a bit of javascript code will appear. Cut and paste this code at the end of the body section of your HTML source code. Now Monitis will record the number of visits you get each hour. You can see this data on your dashboard in a table or bar chart. You can also create a report to analyze daily, weekly, or monthly trends.

Monitis has added yet another video tutorial, this time showing how users can monitor their cloud instances on Amazon AWS, Rackspace, and GoGrid in just a few minutes. To view this and other tutorials or request a live demo, check our Demo page, and subscribe to our Youtube channel.

Previous videos showed how to set up internal monitoring on a physical server using the Monitis Smart Agent. Once installed, the agent collects and sends performance data to Monitis. The agent works on cloud instances too, but you’ll have to install an agent on each new instance. Cloud monitoring automates this process, so you can start monitoring your entire cloud with the click of a button.

The video shows how to configure an account with Amazon EC2. Go to Add Monitor>Cloud Monitor and select Amazon EC2. Enter an Account Name of your choosing, your Amazon AWS Account Number, Account Key, and Secret Key, all provided by Amazon when signing up. Next select the Amazon region you’ve signed up for. You’ll be prompted to upload your Amazon EC2 private key. Monitis will now authenticate you into your Amazon account. You can set monitoring and notification rules to specify what gets monitored on your servers and when alerts should be sent. Monitis can monitor your cloud instances both internally via agent for CPU, Processes, etc., and externally via SSH, HTTP, or Ping. Your Amazon instances will appear on your dashboard along with their performance statistics.

We received some great feedback about video tutorials for External, Internal, Transaction, and Full Page Monitoring, so we’ve decided to make more tutorials. This week we’ve added one for network monitoring.

For starters, you can easily Ping an IP address behind your firewall from a server on which you’ve installed our agent. Simply go to Add Monitor>Internal, check Ping, and enter the IP Address. You can set thresholds for # of Lost Packets and Packet size and set alerts to be notified by email, SMS, Phone call, or IM if these thresholds are reached.

SNMP, short for Simple Network Monitoring Protocol, is the most common protocol for checking network-attached devices, such as routers and switches, for conditions that warrant administrative attention. Once you have the Monitis Agent installed on one of your servers, you can configure SNMP on our web-based dashboard by going to Add Monitor>Internal, checking SNMP, entering the Host IP and the Object Identifier. Every network device comes with Object Identifiers that let you monitor certain characteristics of the device. You can also set up an SNMP Trap, which, instead of polling the device periodically, sends an urgent message to Monitis when a specific problem occurs. Watch as we set one of each of these monitors up in the video, and feel free to try yourself by signup up for our 15 day trial.

The third of our new video tutorials shows how to set up internal monitoring. With other products this is usually a time-consuming process, sometimes taking weeks. Servers usually need a VPN connection to your monitoring server. This can be a pain to set up, especially with remote servers, and particularly with open source systems like Nagios and Zenoss. You also need a database to store historical data and a reporting module. Monitis cuts setup time to 5 minutes by utilizing every shortcut enabled by cloud computing. Instead of reporting to your server, the Monitis internal agent sends encrypted data to the Monitis Cloud via https where it is stored on world class servers. Let’s walk through the steps outlined in the video to set up internal monitoring for 10 servers. We’ll time it. First we log into Monitis, click Add Monitor to load the internal monitoring wizard, and download the proper agent for our operating system. (30 seconds so far)

We are running Linux, so we can automatically install the agent on all ten machines. It takes about 3 minutes. If you’re running Windows, it takes 1 minute to install and activate (with your login) on each server. Here’s a Windows agent that’s been activated.

Firewalls don’t need to be touched since the agent only uses port 443. The same setup.zip file can be used to install the agent on multiple servers, so you only need to download once. Also, you’ll never need to upgrade agents because upgrades are done automatically without manual intervention. Next we go back to the internal monitoring wizard. A list of names assigned to your agents will load. You can assign a tag-name to group internal monitors together. This comes in handy when generating reports. We can multi-select all ten agents and select the metrics to monitor (CPU utilization, memory, drive, http, ping), and click Add. (45 seconds) Dozens of movable, re-sizable graphs appear on the dashboard. Soon they are populated with data.

It took just 4 minutes and 15 seconds to set this up. The time-saving features can be narrowed down to three main points.
1. Agents report to Monitis via https, no need to touch your firewall. Just install and you’re ready to go.
2. Upgrades are done automatically without your intervention. No more concern about patches or versions.
3. Internal Monitoring Wizard lets you configure through any browser, and bulk-configuration of agents is quick and easy.

This video focused on server monitoring. We have another video coming that focuses on network monitoring with SNMP, so stay tuned.

About a year ago my friends and I were scouring the web for cheap weekend packages to Vegas. We found a great deal at Vegas.com that came out to ~$200 each for flight and 2 nights stay, right on the strip. It seemed too good to be true, and it was, because when each time we clicked the Purchase button, it stalled. We tried several times until midnight at which point the price rose by $100. We ended up buying a package on Expedia, whose payment application worked fine.

This is an example of how millions of dollars in sales are lost each day to web application errors. When applications like travel-planners and shopping carts malfunction, they not only hurt sales figures but also tarnish a brand’s reputation. That’s why transaction monitoring is such a valuable investment for e-commerce companies. We’ve made a new video tutorial to show you how easy it is to get started.

Our Transaction Recorder is a Firefox plug-in that records your actions in Firefox. Simply go through the business-critical steps of your web application and watch as the recorder generates a script with commands like click, type, etc. You can manually enter commands to pause, wait for text, or wait for elements. Once the script is complete, you can save it and add it to your dashboard. We will show you how long each step takes to execute, and if there’s an error, we’ll show you a screen capture of the browser and a detailed view of all the objects in the faulty webpage.

Starting this week Monitis is rolling out new video tutorials that will guide users through setting up each type of monitor. The videos are located under the Resources tab of our homepage.  One of the videos is for Full Page Load monitoring, which has been a huge hit since we added it to our services a few weeks ago. It allows users to analyze how objects in their webpage are loading in real browsers in different parts of the world and identify bottlenecks. This is an extremely important measure for understanding user experience, as studies have shown that even a slight lag in load time can cause a noticeable drop in viewership and sales. As the video highlights, Amazon.com discovered that a 100 ms increase in load time resulted in a 1% drop in sales.  One might consider 100ms an unnoticeable duration, but 1% of Amazon’s annual sales is a whopping $300 million! Load time is also one of the parameters used by Google in determining a website’s PageRank.

Adding Full Page Load monitors is very easy.  Simply go to Add Monitor>Full Page Load, enter the url, a name and tagname for your monitor, a timeout threshold, frequency in minutes, and the locations from which to monitor. Click add and it will be added to the dashboard instantly. You can edit settings and add notification rules by click the pencil icon at the top. Clicking a datapoint reveals how the objects loaded during a particular test.  Objects include CSS scripts, Javascript, individual images, RSS, redirects, Frames and iFrames. The load times of these components are shown in a graphical view sometimes called a waterfall, and also in a sortable table. For each object, Monitis lists the following quantities: HTTP Response Code, Total Download time, DNS, Connection, 1st byte, Content Download, and number of bytes.  Sorting these quanities allows the user to quickly identify bottlenecks in the webpage. For example, sorting the DNS column brings the objects with the longest DNS time to the top.

One of our users, a large online news service, found that the website was loading fast save for a couple banner ads that were taking longer than 30 seconds to load. A customer in the education space found that pictures were taking too long to load and needed to be compressed or switched to .png files.

So, below is the video for your viewing pleasure. And if you’d like pricing details check out our Plan Builder. Full Page Load monitoring starts at just $5/month for the same plan that some of our competitors charge $50/month for!

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.

This week we rolled out a couple new updates to the Monitis dashboard.

When you’re monitoring more than 20 or 30 services you need a good way to view them in one place.  That’s what the newly improved Monitis Snapshot views are for.  Let’s take a look at the External and URL Snapshots.

Each row is now click-able, so when you click a URL a more detailed view of that monitor will appear.   You can have multiple External Snapshots on different tabs, each set with a different tag-name.  In the URL Snapshot you can view your most critical URLs (the ones with the slowest response time) or just the top 10, 20, or 30.  Each column in these tables can be sorted, so you can quickly rank by response time or by URL alphabetically.

Internal Snapshots are similar.

The Windows Agents Snapshot shows a list of your Windows servers being monitored and their basic performance metrics.  The CPU, Memory, Drive, and Load Snapshots show the servers that require the most urgent attention.  Using tag-names and the sorting feature, monitoring even hundreds of servers becomes possible.

We also added the Full Page Monitor this week.  It is essentially an advanced external monitor.  It not only shows the response time of a webpage, but also the HTTP response code, total download time, DNS and Connection time, time to the first and last byte, and the total size of objects (js, css, images, external scripts, flash) in the webpage.  This is a great way to identify bottlenecks to your webpages.  Remember, research shows that it only takes a couple seconds before your visitors give up on your site.

To try it out, go to Add Monitor>Full Page and fill in the necessary fields.  Then click Add.


This test loads Yahoo every 5 minutes.  Click the dot and a window containing the individual objects and a table will pop up.

It’s that easy.  And Full Page Monitors start at only $5/location/month for a 20 minute interval, so you can monitor all your webpages without breaking your wallet. More features coming soon, so stay tuned!

When designing the Reports module, we set out to do two things:

1) Eliminate the hassles and bottlenecks inherent in software-based monitoring systems and

2) Utilize the cloud to come up with innovative ways of creating and sharing reports.Our interactive Ajax dashboard makes it possible to add standard or custom reports in just a few clicks, without loading multiple pages.  Let’s walk through adding a report that shows daily performance for the previous month for a url’s uptime.

1) Go to Add Report>External at the top.

2) Select the monitor(s) to be included in the report and the time period.  You can select one, several, or all of your monitors.

3) The report will immediately appear on your dashboard.  You can view the data in a table, line chart, bar chart, or interactive calendar.  In settings you can set SLA thresholds and make the report public.  Public reports are under a separate url accessible by anyone you share the link with.  You can customize them with your own logo.  For this example we’ll use Fabio as our logo:

That’s not the only way to share reports.  You can also put several reports into a new tab and use the Share Page feature.  That will create a link to a read-only, interactive version of the tab, giving anyone in your organization a view of daily, weekly, or monthly data for the websites, servers or applications you want to share.  You can always destroy and recreate these links.

On top of all of that, we also email daily or weekly reports that summarize your IT infrastructure, including internal and external monitoring.  We’re working on some new report formats so stay tuned.

Setting up internal server and network monitoring can be a time-consuming process, sometimes taking weeks.  Servers usually need a VPN connection to your monitoring server.  This can be a pain to set up, especially with remote servers, particularly with open source systems like Nagios and Zenoss.  You also need a database to store historical data and a reporting module.  Monitis cuts setup time to 5 minutes by utilizing every shortcut enabled by cloud computing.  Instead of reporting to your server, the Monitis internal agent sends encrypted data to the Monitis Cloud via https where it is stored on world class servers.   Let’s do a timed setup of internal monitoring for 10 servers.First we log into Monitis, click Add Monitor to load the internal monitoring wizard, and download the proper agent for our operating system. (30 seconds)

We are running Linux, so we can automatically install the agent on all ten machines.  It takes about 3 minutes.  If you’re running Windows, it takes 1 minute to install and activate (with your login) on each server.  Here’s a Windows agent that’s been activated.

Firewalls don’t need to be touched since the agent only uses port 443.  The same setup.zip file can be used to install the agent on multiple servers, so you only need to download once.  Also, you’ll never need to upgrade agents because upgrades are done automatically without manual intervention.Next we go back to the internal monitoring wizard.  A list of names assigned to your agents will load.  You can assign a tag-name to group internal monitors together.  This comes in handy when generating reports.  We can multi-select all ten agents and select the metrics to monitor (CPU utilization, memory, drive, http, ping), and click Add.  (45 seconds) Dozens of movable, re-sizable graphs appear on the dashboard.  Soon they are populated with data.

It took just 4 minutes and 15 seconds to set this up.  The time-saving features can be narrowed down to three main points.1.  Agents report to Monitis via https, no need to touch your firewall.  Just install and you’re ready to go.2.  Upgrades are done automatically without your intervention.  No more concern about patches or versions.3.  Internal Monitoring Wizard lets you configure through any browser, and bulk-configuration of agents is quick and easy.

But don’t take my word for it, sign up for a 2 week trial and see how much time you’ll save.