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.

Installing/setting up anything is only a part of the story,Maintenance is where the real headache lies. Especially true in case of servers, websites and cloud storage. And how would you know when your system fails? Obviously you can’t afford to spend 24 hours keeping a keen eye to see whether or not your system is functioning well. IN comes the role of Monitoring services. Many service providers exist in this space. I will be reviewing Monitis All-in-One Monitoring Platform in this post http://techsplurge.com/web-buzz/monitor-your-websitesserverscloud-and-more-with-monitis/

Another week, another Monitis video, only this time it’s not really a tutorial but a demo of our dashboard features. It starts out by showing the basics. You can make multiple tabs and place different information on each, so it’s not unlike a browser within a browser. Data for a specific monitor is placed into a widget you can easilyy resize or drag and drop. In these widgets you can see a table or chart of monitoring data. Clicking the edit button opens a drop down menu containing all settings, allowing you to change all the settings of a monitor without navigating away.

The toolbar at the bottom right of the page contains some useful features. First there’s the Share Page button, which allows you to share a read-only version of any tab on your dashboard with the outside world via a link. You can place your company logo on these shared pages. Next, the column button lets you change the number of columns on a tab to see information in a more or less condensed fashion. There is a Flash button which lets you taggle between Flash and non-Flash charts, but since we are almost completely HTML5 now, this will soon be phased out. There is a button that lets you collapse and expand all widgets at once on a page, useful for finding things fast. There’s a calendar which lets you go back in time and see historical data just by clicking a past date. There are also links to Support and News.

In My Account>Options, you can change your default language (English, Russian, French and German are supported), skin colors(Blue, Grey, Pink, Blackberry), and date format(US and UK). Under My Account you can also add Notes and a Task List to your dashboard, and access your Affiliate link. All users have their own affiliate link which rewards them with 10% of all first year revenues of signups through that link. As always, you can view this and other tutorials on our Tutorials page or our Youtube page.

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.

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.

For a while now Google has been trying to diversify its revenue by going into the enterprise space with Google Apps, the productivity suite that includes Gmail, Docs, Calendar, and more.  They’ve gained some traction so far, having signed some multi-million dollar contracts with large corporations, government entities and universities.  But to turn Google Apps into a multi-billion dollar revenue source, Google needs to address the fears organizations have about cloud security.  That’s why they released a Security white paper last week.  The main argument is that data is stored and replicated across several disparate data-centers with multiple security levels.  Google also has a security page for schools.  On it they say:

It’s your content, not ours. Your Apps content belongs to your school, or individual users at your school. Not Google.

We don’t look at your content. Google employees will only access content that you store on Apps when an administrator from your domain grants Google employees explicit permission to do so for troubleshooting.

We don’t share your content. Google does not share personal information with advertisers or other 3rd parties without your consent.

We sometimes scan content. And for very good reasons, like spam filtering, anti-virus protection, or malware detection. Our systems scan content to make Apps work better for users, enabling unique functionality like powerful search in Gmail and Google Docs. This is completely automated and involves no humans.

As a fellow cloud company we often face the same concerns over cloud security, so it’s nice to see how Google addresses them.  Monitis is actually at an advantage because we performance data, not sensitive personal data.  We share a similarly secure infrastructure, storing data on several disparate data-centers.  Given Google’s vast network of data-centers, there’s no reason why Google Apps should be any less secure than storing data in-house, and white-papers like this one will accelerate cloud migration.  You can see Monitis white papers here.

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.

If you’re an IT person, you’ve probably experienced a flood of alerts to your phone or email for a downtime issue you already knew about.  Chances are there’s also been a time when you weren’t notified fast enough for an important issue only to hear about it from management a day later.  These all too common incidents are why a powerful notification module is necessary for a great IT monitoring solution. 

The two main qualities to look for are reliability (to make sure you get notified when you need to) and flexibility (to specify when and how to receive notifications and when not to).  At Monitis we’ve taken great measures to ensure the reliability of our notifications.  We use world-class and backup providers for SMS and Email alerts, the same used by Oracle, Nokia, and CNN.  We are also cloud-based, which means that if your entire data-center goes down, our notification system will still be up to alert you.  The same is not true for monitoring software.  

We’ve also designed our notification system to be flexible and easy-to-setup.  Here are some features that come in very handy.  

Here we have set up a rule for one contact to receive email alerts after 3 consecutive failures in European monitoring locations, and we are preparing  a rule to receive SMS alerts after 2 consecutive failures in the US.   By using the options pointed out and combining multiple rules, any customized notification strategy can be achieved to ensure that the proper person gets notified at the right time when this monitor reads a failure.  We can have alerts sent to admins after 1 minute of downtime, and an alert sent to the IT manager after 10 minutes of downtime creating an escalation path for persistent failures.

                We also have the option to set rules for a contact rather than a monitor.  For example, you can specify that an email address should receive notifications after 3 US failures for any external monitor or from a group of monitors with a common tag name.  First click on the settings icon in the Contacts box and “Specify Rules.”  This form will pop up.