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.

Louisiana State University (LSU) has a great story to tell about using the cloud to build a state of the art course management system (CMS), and it is an effort involving teachers, students and administration.

The school realized that it needed to consolidate two CMSs that they were using, one a Blackboard-based system and the other internally created and managed, in order to gain maximum efficiency and sustainability. In order to be sustainable, the CMS had to consider:

- The software development cycle
- The resources necessary to finance and maintain the CMS during this lifecycle
- The ability to evolve the CMS to meet ever-changing demands
- The ease of feature development during the lifecycle

After a lengthy review of systems in the marketplace, LSU picked the open-source tool Moodle, hosted by vendor Moodlerooms. The school picked Moodle for its sustainability, flexibility for customization, as well as its interoperability, allowing LSU’s IT staff to tie the application directly into legacy systems.

Only a year after its adoption and the conversion of 5,000 courses into Moodle, LSU saw dramatic increases in CMS usage (140% increase), training and support usage (including a 40% increase in instructor participation) — and all within its previous budget.  What’s more, LSU has been able to continually tweak its CMS, due to the open-source nature of Moodle.

One thing I’d advise LSU to do, however, is to keep a close eye on its hosted CMS. Whether we’re talking about Moodle or Blackboard or any other system, it’s crucial to make sure that the system is up and running smoothly for your students, faculty and staff to access. Monitoring services, such as Monitis, can provide load testing services and valuable, timely notifications to warn you when a system or app is down.

So, you’ve migrated to the cloud, or at least you’re considering it, and now you want to employ a monitoring solution. Good decision.

After all, enterprise networks are getting more complex as globalization continues to rage – despite the recession. And outsourcing and the growth of wireless are expanding networks beyond their traditional reach. Consider, too, that IT departments are being asked to guarantee that applications and services run well across both private and public networks.

Beyond that, the rise and growth of virtualization and cloud computing makes the job of monitoring and troubleshooting all the components of a computing network even more of a challenge. Why? Because virtualization removes the hardware from the application and creates traffic more difficult to monitor and troubleshoot. And with cloud computing, apps are not housed on the existing enterprise infrastructure and instead reside over the public network. Because ownership of the issue is now shared between the IT staff and your cloud service provider, it makes it even more difficult to correctly identify and track down performance issues.

So the heat is on; and ratchets the pressure up a notch with CIOs demanding cost reduction and higher service levels. All in all, it means finding ways to work more efficiently and effectively. And the right network management tools will offer you the right mix of products that meet both your monitoring and management needs.

So what kinds of capabilities should you look for in a network management system? In this post, I’ll focus on the generalities, and then in subsequent posts, I’ll discuss specific vendors that might be useful to you.

First, because change is a constant, not only in business but in life, too, IT must keep the network up and running regardless of moves, additions and changes. While network management solutions were once built solely to manage devices, now they’re more complex because they have to manage new types of traffic – such as voice and streaming video which are very latency sensitive. Plus, now that private corporate networks are on the public Internet, there are new concerns that IT must be concerned about – such as traffic levels and security issues.

So, consequently, it’s important to consider solutions that can monitor:

- network traffic

- end-user activities

- applications

- networking protocols

- servers

- network hardware

- virtual machines

- protocols

- cloud platforms

You need these elements for a complete end-to-end picture of network health.

These individual elements are necessary for the whole because, too often, when there are performance problems, the network is the first to be blamed. In fact, the problem could just as easily be an application glitch or trouble with end-user activities. Monitoring provides IT with a more proactive rather than reactive approach – as it will help mitigate problems before they happen and reduce mean time between failures.

Right now, unfortunately, most enterprise IT network departments use many disparate tools to try and improve visibility. Plus, IT departments are too often structured into distinct organizations, and that only compounds the problem because information isn’t shared. For greater visibility, things must change, and IT groups must work to share information in order to be proactive.

Network management suites have expanded well beyond monitoring just devices, and this broader view helps networking engineers determine potential bottlenecks before they happen. Putting the right enterprise network management solution in place sheds light on the entire network and improves overall network stability and reliability.

At Monitis, our end-to-end monitoring system offers:

- True 1 min frequency monitoring simultaneously from multiple locations in America, Europe, Asia and Australia

- The ability to customize and set up your own monitoring locations

- No false alarms – failures verified across multiple locations

- Monitors websites, e-Mail servers, firewalls, VoIP, databases, Domain Name Servers, routers, Web Servers from end user perspective

- Supported protocols – HTTP, HTTPS, FTP, SMTP, POP3, IMAP, SSH, PING, TCP, UDP, SIP, MySQL, DNS.

- Internal server and network monitoring including CPU, Memory, Server Processes, Bandwidth, SNMP, telnet.

- Web page content check – specify string to be checked for existence/non-existence on web page

- WebMap view – see all your servers and web sites in the single map view

As we start the New Year, I want to take a quick look back to review some of the incredible milestones we’ve witnessed and orchestrated here at Monitis. We’ve watched the cloud industry expand and grow – with new cloud providers launching their platforms and a variety of new service providers bringing their brands and tools to the cloud.

Last year was an incredibly successful year for Monitis, as more and more companies making the move to the cloud relied upon our monitoring services (such as external monitoring, back-end monitoring, web traffic monitoring, transaction monitoring and EC2/S3 cloud monitoring.

We grew our customer base by 400% and our revenue by 500% last year. As you might guess, I’m ecstatic about those numbers, not just because it means we’re doing better, but because it represents growth for the whole industry, too. And I think it proves growing recognition by companies that accessing services, information and apps via the cloud – but safely – is the future of IT.

One of our biggest thrills this past year happened in November, at The 451 Group’s 4th Annual Client Conference in Boston. We competed with a group of other technology companies in the event’s “Innovators Showcase,” and we gave a presentation called “Monitoring in the Cloud: Monitor Anything from Anywhere.” We won! and we were named “Most Innovative Start-Up of 2009.”

2009 was also a year of continuous enhancements and innovations to our services. I’ll list them below, and as you read through these developments and click on the links to learn more detail, you’ll be able to chart just how far we’ve come in delivering state-of-the-art, cloud-based network and systems monitoring .

I’m very proud, and I’m grateful beyond words to you, our customers. I sincerely hope you’ll help us usher in a new year of enhancements and services that, I am certain, will help you grow and expand your own businesses. We’ve got some exciting things planned!

Our 2009 Milestones:

- Launch of ‘Top 10′ service – providing network and systems engineers with a holistic view of processes and applications that are consuming the most resources, enabling them to quickly diagnose or prevent problems and properly match IT infrastructure capacity to business needs.

- Launch of asset management as a service, which automatically creates inventory of software, logs usage patterns and proactively suggests optimization to help companies reduce IT cost.

- Announcement of remote monitoring of system events.

- Launch of performance testing as a service, enabling companies to instantly run site performance tests, as well as keep historical records and manage performance scripts.

- Launch of public reporting and widgets, features that enabled our customers to make their websites’ uptime statistics publicly available – for the benefit of their own customers.

- Launch of our cloud monitoring service

- The addition of a monitoring location in China – expanding our global coverage

- The addition of a new external monitoring location within Amazon EC2 cloud network, allowing customers of the cloud provider to check their users’ web experience locally.

- Tweet alerts for network failures on Twitter

- Management Information Base (MIB) browsing for MonitorSNMP. A MIB is a type of database used to manage the devices in a communications network and comprises a collection of objects in a virtual database used to manage a network’s routers and switches.

- Introduction of remote monitoring to work on the Sun’s Solaris platform

- A free links checker service to detect broken and dead-end website links and alert users

- An interface for command-line tools to help make IT folks more productive and efficient

- A web ecosystem visualization service called WebMap, which helps IT engineers and managers understand their networks better in terms of status, health and manageability.

- Monitis S3 Monitoring, an on-demand cloud storage and usage service, enabling customers to independently monitor Amazon S3, notifying them when they reach prescribed thresholds.

- Database performance management and load testing from the cloud.

- User-friendly enhancements, such as the ability to manage all external monitors from a single, central location, enabling customers to edit network settings, monitor timeouts, change monitoring locations, schedule maintenance, and schedule and set up notification rules for all monitors from a single place.

- A new scheduling feature for our on-demand load testing

- Special holiday pricing for e-commerce monitoring – to help prevent site downtime

- MonitorSNMP, an enterprise-grade SNMP network monitoring service available via the cloud

- A time-saving universal cloud monitoring framework that enables external and internal monitoring from all cloud-hosting providers including Rackspace Cloud, Amazon Web Services and GoGrid.

- The ability for customers to create custom, end-to-end locations for server monitoring locations

- A free service to instantly check website response times from different locations

- Enterprise-class options for system failure and performance outage notification management

Ever wonder how cloud-based transaction monitoring works?

A good transaction monitoring service should ensure fast application performance and good user experience for visitors from anywhere around the globe. And it should guarantee complete business functionality of applications 24 hours, seven days per week.

Here’s a detailed description of what the services entail for one company – the world’s largest package delivery firm and a leading global provider of specialized transportation and logistics. They use transaction monitoring to make sure the billing and reporting modules on its website are available continuously.

The independent monitoring service follows activities on their site every five minutes – all day long. Among tasks, the monitoring service:

1. Opens the website
2. Logs into the system, using a “test” user account
2. Goes to the payments page and searches for available invoices
3. Finds the latest invoice and goes to the details page and checks certain content
4. Checks the history of all invoices
5. Goes to the report generation page
6. Generates report of payments and checks the content
7. Downloads the report
8. Signs out from the system

Reports from the monitoring service summarizes the end-user customer experience for the company – offering information on peak, mid-point and low activity periods.

The company was able to investigate low-activity periods by studying a detailed transaction report provided by the monitoring service. It soon discovered that its Sign In/Sign Out and Invoice History pages were slow.

As a result, the company was able to pinpoint operational issues, optimize its database and, in the end, improve the user experience for its visitors and customers.

Read more information on how this company is benefitting from transaction and website monitoring.

When people talk about businesses using the cloud, we often think of companies in the classic sense – some global, private enterprise or even a mid-sized company deciding to re-apply resources and save by switching data storage and apps virtually.

But all kinds of organizations are benefiting by using cloud applications. Take schools and universities, for one.

There are many wonderful and productivity-enhancing applications that academic institutions use on the cloud to manage all facets of administration. For example, there’s Blackboard, which offers software to help schools manage courses, process transactions and e-commerce as well as oversee online communities. Another course management system housed on the cloud is the open-source Moodle program – also used by many schools and universities around the world.

But, as I’ve said many times before in this blog (it’s always worth repeating, though), cloud computing is great – but even better when you can employ cloud-based services, such as monitoring, to ensure security and a solid, safe and satisfying user experience.

There’s a lot that could go wrong, and thus a lot that needs monitoring! Internet business processes such as shopping carts, forms, internal search engines and logins all rely on servers and web applications. If a failure occurs, your customers can’t continue the order process, and they won’t be able to use your application. Those customers, visitors and users will go elsewhere, and as a result, you’ll lose revenue and repeat visits.  And that means a loss of future business, too.

To keep things running smoothly, you need a service to continually monitor your transactions and alert you when any of the various steps in a transaction don’t work correctly. Thus, you increase revenue and enhance your reputation for quality and performance online.

One mark of a good monitoring service is its ability to simulate real customers, visitors and users and monitor from within the browser. So, monitoring is performed from the same perspective as that of the end-user.

Since this is the business I’m in, you might be a bit skeptical at the advice I’m offering. But if you don’t want to take my word for it, listen to Jeff Paul Solomon, systems administrator at Loyola Marymount University, who employed Monitis to monitor its course-management system:

“We had just brought up a highly-visible, web-based application.  We could monitor the servers, but really needed a way to monitor user-experience – not just verifying that the web page was up, or even if the user could log in, but how long it took and what the user could see on subsequent pages.  We found Monitis, which gave us fantastic transaction monitor features, and allowed us to tune our application and be notified before users started to call.  The support we received was unbelievable, great and responsive.  I would definitely recommend Monitis.”

Bottom line: you don’t want frustrated website customers or end-users of your cloud-based app calling to report a problem that you’re unaware of – all the while losing money and prestige. Back up your business or system with monitoring services and avoid potential troubles.

Read other testimonials about how cloud-based monitoring is working for all kinds of organizations!

Even though we’re still not far into fall, you can tell by the catalogues that come in the daily mail that the holidays are fast approaching. So if you’ve got a website, this is a good time to start preparing for the usually pumped-up holiday traffic volume.

In this season, it’ll be more important than ever to make sure your site is up and functioning 24/7, and that it is performing at optimum levels. What will it cost you if your site is down? Well, figure this: every minute of downtime costs you a percentage of sales. To get a good idea, first, find out how much you’re selling per month. Then, divide it by 720 hours (30 days X 24 hours). Next, divide that number by 60 (minutes), and you’ll begin to realize how much you may lose if your site isn’t functional.

Speaking in dollars, if you’re selling $500,000 in goods per month, then you’ll forfeit almost $700 per hour of downtime – or about $12 per minute. If you’re at $1 million per month, that’s $24 per minute.. Other negatives aside from lost money: your damaged reputation, the trust of your customers, and any new customers who may have hit upon your site and bought something – but couldn’t because you were down. Does that make you feel like saying, “Ho ho ho!?” Probably not.

But look on the bright side, if you’re prepared with a good monitoring service that provides valuable transaction statistics and alerts you when things go wrong, you’ll minimize your risk of losing sales and customers. For a big-picture view of what’s at stake, Forrester Research is projecting online retail sales to rise 11 percent, to $156 billion, growing to 7 percent of overall retail revenue (from 6 percent in 2008). And the analysts project $229 billion in online sales by 2010.

Now, until November 10^th, Monitis is offering special pricing during this merry (but critical) season for transaction monitoring services – where we’ll check functionality continuously, measure performance and notify you how things are going via SMS. For example, we’ll continuously check and report on: customer actions such as logging on to the site, searching for an item, adding it to the cart, checking out, order tracking and updating, payment and other actions.

You’ll be ahead of the crowd if you invest the time and effort to monitor your site. An Internet Retailer survey says that most retailers conduct some kind of site monitoring, but just 16% test performance from different geographic locations or during different parts of the day. And only 16% perform specific transaction monitoring. The same survey indicates that fully 25% performance-test their sites monthly or less, and more than 37% test weekly or less frequently.

Below is a rundown of the plans, the pricing and what you’ll get from Monitis’s special deals. The Platinum Retail plan gives you the most frequent monitoring for the most URLs.

No time to lose to take advantage of Monitis’ holiday Basic, Gold and Platinum ecommerce monitoring plans and their special discounts! More at http://monitis.com/special

San Jose, CA – Oct 29, 2009 – Monitis, the leading provider of 100% Cloud-based network and systems monitoring solutions, today announced a major holiday discount of 60% on Monitis e-Commerce Monitoring, it’s industry-leading suite of website monitoring tools for online shops.

According to Hovhannes Avoyan, Monitis’ Founder and CEO, “On average, online shop sites were down for 7 hours during the 2008 holiday season. That represents millions of online sales lost and countless customer relationships damaged. Monitis e-Commerce Monitoring insures during that the critical holiday sales period, you’ve got the information you need to keep your online shops up as much as possible.”

Monitis e-Commerce Monitoring monitors functionality and site performance for online stores by simulating actual consumer behavior on our client’s online shops every 5 minutes. While home pages often run well, many online retailers are unaware when their customer experience degrades as customers move closer to completing a transaction. Monitis e-Commerce Monitoring alerts retailers to problems as they happen so that corrective action can be taken immediately and the loss of online sales minimized.

The functions monitored by Monitis e-Commerce Monitoring include:

• log-in
  

• product search
  

• shopping carts
  

• check-out
  

• order tracking
  

• order updating
  

• payment processing
  

• product detail pages
  

• and more
  

Want to maximize your uptime this holiday season? Act now, as Monitis’ 60% holiday discount on its Monitis e-Commerce Monitoring suite is good only through Monday, November 9, 2009. Get Monitis e-Commerce Monitoring today and insure you keep every penny shoppers want to spend with you. More at http://Monitis.com/special

About Monitis All-in-One Monitoring Platform

Monitis is a 100% Cloud-based, complete, and flexible IT monitoring solution which consolidates backend monitoring, application monitoring, website monitoring, and cloud monitoring in an all-in-one, central monitoring service. The platform is easily  customizable and may be used for managing all kinds of IT assets such as websites, servers, routers, switches, VoIP devices, DNS, databases, processes and any other IP devices.  Monitis provides users with a comprehensive view of their system’s health and performance. 

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 based 100% in the Cloud.

Besides Monitis’ enthusiastic and loyal user base of 50,000 customers from small businesses to Fortune 500 companies to government agencies and educational institutions, Monitis has won rave reviews from the technology analyst community. The 451 Group has recently named Monitis as one of it’s 6 Innovators of 2009, based on how Monitis’ Cloud-based monitoring helps companies reduce system downtime, improve the productivity of their IT staff, and reduce operational expenditures.

Monitis was founded in 2005 by a team of seasoned entrepreneurs and fed-up and worn-out developers who were tired of complaining about the limits of software-based tools, while inspired by the promise of the Cloud.  Headquartered in San Jose, CA, Monitis is lead by a team of IT professionals with deep experience running enterprise-grade IT businesses, as well as starting and selling several IT start-ups.  Using a global workforce, particularly its R&D team based in Yerevan, Armenia, Monitis is poised to move from strength to strength.  At present, it has a loyal and enthusiastic user community of 50,000, and an average month-on-month revenue growth of over 10%.

Contact:

Monitis Inc.

Sales & Marketing Department

info@monitis.com

http://www.monitis.com

US & Canada Toll Free: +1-800-657-7949

UK + International: +44-845-527-3346

France + International: +33-48-607-9035

2880 Zanker Road Suite 203

San Jose, CA-95134

USA

Today, more companies than ever are offering complex business services over the Internet via cloud computing. For business-critical applications, every minute of downtime means lost sales, customers and opportunities. It is a challenge to keep websites up and running round the clock.

Web monitoring services can help businesses make sure that their sites are functioning. Yet, simply checking if a website is working and online doesn’t mean that users are having a satisfactory experience. It’s like driving a 20-year old car. Is it working? Well, yes. But are you enjoying the bumpy, rattly ride? That’s another story.

Due to many reasons like peak traffic at rush hours, publicity campaigns that drive people to sites, a bug in software, database issues or the failure of third-party services, your online applications can become slow or non functional, disappoint visitors and prod them to leave and visit rival sites.

The answer is transaction monitoring services, which have two goals:

1. ensuring fast application performance and good user experience for visitors from anywhere around the globe
2. guaranteeing complete business functionality of applications 24 hours, seven days per week

Package Delivery, Transportation and Logistics Case Study

Lets consider how a Monitis Inc., customer, the world’s largest package delivery company and a leading global provider of specialized transportation and logistics, uses transaction monitoring to ensure the continuous availability of billing and reporting modules on the company’s website. They’ve used Monitis to monitor the following activities on their site every 5 minute, 24 hours per day:

1. open the website
2. logging in to the system, using a “test” user account
2. go to the payments’ page and search for available invoices
3. find the latest invoice and go to the details’ page and check certain content
4. go and check the history of all invoices
5. go to the report generation page
6. generate report of payments and check the content
7. download the report
8. sign out from the system

Monitis Transaction Monitoring Summary Report

The above Monitis report summarizes the end-user customer experience for the company, reporting peak, mid-point and low activity periods. To investigate low-activity periods, the company studied a Monitis detailed transaction report, shown below, and discovered that its Sign In/Sign Out and Invoice History pages were slow. As a result of studying this information, the company was able to pinpoint operational issues, optimize its database and, in the end, improve the user experience for its visitors and customers.

Continuous transactions monitoring ensures high functional availability for the application. You can read more Monitis blog posts about transactions monitoring best practices! Or Download Application and Transaction Monitoring Users Guide here.