Unleashing the power of M3 & timers

During the lifespan of M3 (Monitis Monitor Manager) there has always been something lacking – timers.

M3 execution procedure was outlined in this previous article.

The execution mentioned in the latter was a one-time-execution, whereas server monitoring requires periodic invocation of monitors in order to actually provide counters over time, graphing performance.

The periodic invocation method suggested up until today was to integrate M3 with crontab.

Crontab, in a nutshell, is a Linux/Unix service for periodic invocation of executables. Implementing M3 with crontab properly meant M3 would run every X minutes, producing a Monitis counter update every X minutes, should everything run properly.

In the following article I’ll outline the changes done to support timers in M3.

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.

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.

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.

At Monitis we take feedback very seriously. Over the past couple months we’ve been
hard at work adding new features and improving user experience based on requests
from our users. We’ve had a lot of requests for new reports, so we’ve added a lot of
functionality there. We’ve also simplified the dashboard to make it easier to find things.
Here are some of the enhancements.

1. New top menu layout for improved usability. We reduced the number of menu items to six, so hopefully things will be easier to find.

2. New HTML-based tabular views for extended support of Flash-disabled browsers.

3. New special management reports: We’ve added an Uptime Report, Performance Report, and SLA Reports for External, Fullpage and Transaction monitors. These show performance for the last day, week and month. Easily share with one-click email, PDF, or CSV. We recently made a video tutorial that goes over these and other reporting features.

Hooray! Cyber Monday capped off a week of holiday shopping that saw more Americans choose online purchases than doing it the old-fashioned way, that is, going to the mall.

A Wall Street Journal article quoted comScore.com estimates showing a 15% gain in Cyber Monday sales from a year earlier — from $913 million last year to $1.1 billion. No wonder, Cyber Monday discounts were huge, such as the Toysrus.com 60% discount and plenty of free shipping offers. How about a 47-inch TV at Amazon.com for $599? In the article, Amazon reported that that item was sold out by Monday morning.

While online shopping is still just 8-10% of total U.S. retail shopping, it behooves website owners who want to keep profiting during the holidays to make sure that their sites are up and running and customers have a pleasant experience.

How do you do this? Choose a web monitoring service that can work non-stop and doesn’t have to depend on whether your server is up or down to gain access (because it uses the cloud). A few other important features to look for in a monitoring service:

- a quick and easy solution that you can start up fast and get working quick

- a service that lets you start small (e.g. transaction monitoring) and ramp up when you want to monitor more (e.g. transaction monitoring plus cloud monitoring plus website traffic monitoring, among other things)

- fast notifications of downtime or other problems through email, phone, instant messaging, Twitter, URL callback and other means (You’re covered; trust me!)

Have a happy holiday sales season, and make it even happier by ensuring you’re always up and running and your website apps are working and making customers smile!

Most of us have to go back to work the Monday after Thanksgiving. But it appears that a lot of people may be using that time to shop, too.

I read an article about a new survey that shows more people plan to shop on what’s known as “Cyber Monday,” the Monday after Thanksgiving, than on Friday, the traditional huge holiday shopping day (which is the day after Thanksgiving). In the survey, 45% planned to shop Cyber Monday, versus 37% who planned to shop on Black Friday. Last year, figures show that online sales brought in $887 million in online shopping sales on Cyber Monday versus $595 million on Black Friday.

Still, more money will be spent on Black Friday, says the survey: respondents plan to spend an average $353 that day versus an average $233 per person for Cyber Monday.

It makes sense to me that Monday will be a busy shopping day, especially for online sales. Who wants to wake up early after Thanksgiving Day to wait on a line outside a WalMart or Apple store? Not me.

If you have an online business, it also makes sense to keep your transactions monitoring activities going all holiday season long — especially Web Load Testing – to ensure that you can handle the load of increased traffic.

In short, my advice is: stay on guard all season long — because as I’m fond on saying on this blog — you’re competition is merely a click away.

Since we at Monitis monitor websites and traffic, as well as provide services like web load-testing, I’m always on the lookout for news or stories on the state of web hosting these days.

Well, I found some, and I thought I’d share; these three pieces of advice come from some promo material from a web-hosting company in Australia.

1. Don’t take others’ recommendations for a good web-hosting company. The best strategy is to search for web hosts online; read reviews from actual users. And, if you like, you can contact us, and we at Monitis will give you some good recommendations based on our experience monitoring them.

2. You should be worried if your site, and even the host’s site, goes down for more than 24 hours. What should concern you even more is if you haven’t received a prior warning that your site is down. This is why it’s so important to choose a service to actually watch over the hosting company — an objective party, if you will — who can provide you with notifications, preferably via a wide range of methods (e.g. phone, email, MSM) in the event of an outage. A side note: there’s no good reason for frequent or lengthy outages. Consider instead that the company might just not be doing a professional job managing their servers.

3. Don’t even consider web hosting outfits that don’t have the ability to automate or correctly administer your billing and payments. If you’ve got one already that can’t do this, get rid of them. Often, hosting companies deduct the monthly billing amount from your PayPal or bank account without breaking out charge information to display extra charges. Even if your web hosting company does provide this level of detail, keep close tabs on their billing methods.

Choose carefully when picking website hosts. The last thing you want is to aggravate your end-users and/or lose customers to a competitor who’s just a click away.

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.