The packet analyzer is computer software, and sometimes hardware, that can intercept and also log digital network traffic. As data streams flow through the network, the packet analyzer captures each information packet and will decode and analyze the content (according to the appropriate RFC or other specifications). Packet analyzers are sometimes referred to as network analyzers, protocol analyzers, and sniffers.

Packet sniffers are versatile applications. For network maintenance, you can use packet sniffers to monitor network usage, gather and report network statistics, and debug client/ server communications and network protocol implementations. Security uses include the ability to analyze network problems and detect network intrusion attempt. In an offensive mode, packet sniffers allow you to gather information for effecting a network intrusion and spy on other network users. More controversial uses include the ability to collect sensitive information, such as passwords (depending on any content encryption methods which may be in use, and reverse engineer proprietary protocols used over the network.

Tcpdump is a popular packet analyzer with a command-line interface. It is used to capture and display TCP/IP packets (as well as other protocols) on the monitoring system’s network segment. This program is frequently used to troubleshoot network applications, but it can also be used to debug problems with the network itself, usually by detecting problems with the network routing configuration. Tcpdump can also be used to intercept network communications originating from another computer. By running tcpdump on a computer acting as a router or gateway, the user can display unencrypted information (such as that sent with TELNET or HTTP) including login IDs, passwords, URL requests, website content, and any other unencrypted data.

Wireshark, which was originally known as Ethereal, was renamed in May 2006 because of trademark issues. Wireshark is used for network troubleshooting, analysis, software and communications development and education. Even though Wireshark is similar to tcpdump, it has much more information sorting and filtering options as well as a graphical front end. The user is able to see all of the traffic that is being sent over the network, which is usually Ethernet, even though support is being added for other networks.

Ettercap is a network protocol analyzer and security auditing tool for Windows and UNIX. Ettercap can capture traffic, including passwords, on a network segment and it can be used to perform active eavesdropping. The software supports active and passive analysis of a number of common protocols, including encrypted protocols, and provides other network and host analysis features as well. Ettercap has four operating modes: 1) IP-based monitoring, in which packets are filtered by IP source and destination; 2) MAC-based monitoring, where packets are filtered by MAC address (this mode is useful for analyzing connections through a gateway); 3) ARP-based, which uses ARP poisoning to monitor a full-duplex switched LAN connection between two hosts; 4) PublicARP-based, which also uses ARP poisoning on a switched LAN, but is intended for monitoring half-duplex traffic between a victim host and other servers.

Red Hat announces the launch of the most recent edition of its benchmark open source operating system, RHEL (Red Hat Enterprise Linux) 5.4, with plenty of features to admire in this latest commercial Linux. A big plus is that virtualization is built right into this system. This RHEL version integrates KVM, Kernel-based Virtual Machine, which – in contrast to VMWare or XenServer – is built right into the operating system rather than as an add-on format. In fact, just as the name implies, it is incorporated directly within the Linux kernel.

Red Hats’ KVM can run up to sixteen virtual machines having up to 256 GB of RAM each. Because they function like a real machine would, you can use the normal RHEL management tools to make them work. Paravirtualized disk and network drivers have been incorporated into the LREL 5.4 for even better I/O performance. Even though Xen based virtualization is completely supported, the KVM hypervisor will only function correctly when used with the regular/non-Xen kernel.

RHEL’s also improved SystemTap toolset for performance monitoring will make it even easier for you to keep track of your C++ applications. With SystemTap, you can write instrumentation for a live running kernel with its simple command line interface and scripting language. A bigger library of internal “tapset” scripts, and newly published samples, are also available to assist with reuse and abstraction.

When you think of “the cloud” in IT, what benefits to your organization come to mind? With this “outsourced virtualization”, it certainly makes IT operations greener and prevents bottlenecks; it also helps organizations concentrate less on IT operations and more on their core functions. Analysts agree that going “to the cloud” is the first step towards the IT infrastructure of the future. Compared to traditional operations, moving your IT infrastructure into “the cloud” helps you deliver computing power within your organization in a much more efficient way, both financially and logistically – not to mention the benefits of not being responsible for upgrading outdated hardware and software on a regular basis.

Previously we talked about Cloud/SaaS apps advantages for clients, but what Cloud will mean regarding systems management and monitoring is as follows: Small and mid size businesses are looking for two sorts of services regarding systems management: performance and external end to end uptime, led by such companies as Gomez and Keynote; and network monitoring and servers, minus the big four with big enterprise focus-for this space, clients usually think of Adventnet (now Zoho), Solarwinds, and open sources vendors such as Zabbix, Nagios, and Zenoss. Though the first category is natural for Cloud apps since they have to be out of a corporate firewall, the second one is usually conventional software.

Our customers have told us that they have two primary needs. First, they need easy and quick way to monitor their networks and servers through a centralized application utilizing all benefits of multiple tenant architecture, benefits we’ve described in past posts. Some vendors generate an instance of each application from the cloud infrastructure, from Amazon or some other vendor. However, these are not true cloud applications, comparable to those operated by Salesforce.com. IT engineers and managers will benefit from faster deployment, lower initial capital requirements, and easily scalable architectures that will allow them to grow a little bit at a time.

Secondly, internal servers and network monitoring needs to be merged with external end-to-end monitoring. This should be done in a single product which delivers a consolidated view of overall system performance. External monitoring is focused on business transactions and end-user experience tied to service level agreements provided to third parties whilst IT Staff were responsible for the internal functions of server and network monitoring. The role of IT in business is gaining more importance with time as IT goals become more aligned with overall business goals.

System administrators may wonder what benefits they will reap from a changeover to centralized systems monitoring in the cloud. We tell them they will have better speed of deployment and more control and visibility. They can take advantage of proactive monitoring and early notification. Some technologies and administrators would have liked but couldn’t have considered because of high cost and complexity will now be available. It is safe to say that the control over end-user experience administrators will have with consolidated monitoring will ease a lot of their workload. In short, they can put their efforts where their skills are best used and gain recognition and admiration from their supervisors.

Orders, not errors, are what you want from your new ecommerce website. Keeping customers happy and product/service requests rolling in is easy to do with Synthetic Transaction Monitoring Services. With Monitis Transaction Monitoring in the Cloud, there can be constant monitoring done on simulated transactions on websites. It’s ideally used for ecommerce enabled sites and for online banks and other service providers.

With Monitis, you keep track of the usual steps (search, purchase, order tracking, etc.) that users take to finish transactions on your site. Monitis can also assist in writing scenarios free of charge. The steps can then be simulated regularly. If these steps are not finished, which means there’s an issue, then you or the support staff will be informed right away and the corrections can be done. This really helps if the site is using third party services for ordering processes, like processing credit cards or doing real time shipping calculations.

For the past fifteen years, Bessemer Venture Partners has focused its investments in the Software as Service business model, and has investments in over a dozen projects such as  Verisign, Cyota, Postini and Trigo. The emergence of software-as-a-service, we at Bessemer Venture Partners believe, is the single most important trend in the modern software industry. This monumental shift, from software as product to software as service is just the beginning. Bessemer’s top ten laws for being “Saas-y” was developed in early 2008 to describe and incorporate the best practices and counter intuitive discoveries that Bessemer has discovered in the SaaS field.

1. Your most important monthly financial measurements are Churn, Cash Flow, and CMRR (Committed Monthly Recurring Revenue). For years, software executives have been taught that Bookings are the most important single measurement of a growth software business. That is not the case for SaaS companies, where Bookings data is highly misleading. They instead focus on Monthly Recurring Revenue, which is simply the total amount of all current recurring income from subscriptions. BVP believes that a forward view of Committed MRR is even more important than the present MRR data.

SaaS executives need to track churn in detail from a “logos lost” (lost customers) perspective as well as the amount of lost CMRR. It’s very difficult and expensive to grow subscription businesses if you have moderate customer churn, and prohibitive if your churn is high. Whereas the largest legacy enterprise software companies literally made hundreds of millions of dollars over the last decade with “shelf-ware” projects that never got fully implemented, project failure is not an option for SaaS businesses or the customer will simply turn you off, regardless of your contract terms. The top performing SaaS companies typically achieve annual customer renewal rates above 90% – with most of the churn due to death (bankruptcies) or marriage (acquisitions) – and over 100% renewals on a dollar value basis due to up-sells into this installed base.

Cash Flow is the other key metric. To be fair, visibility into the current cash position and the change in the cash position has always been important for software executives, but is even more critical for SaaS businesses because the working capital requirements are higher and the payment terms are often stretched out over the term of the contract. Given the high cost of capital for private SaaS companies, wise executives will often offer slight MRR discounts to customers in exchange for quarterly or annual pre-payment terms, and provide incentives for their sales force accordingly.

2. Customer Acquisition Cost (CAC) and Customer LifeTime Value (CLTV) are the best indicators of long term value creation. It can be argued persuasively that SaaS is a lousy business model because your costs are front-loaded and your revenue only arrives in modest monthly or annual payments. However, as we know from the cable industry, subscription businesses can be very profitable over time. The key to long term financial health is to keep customers happy so their payments keep coming, and coming, and coming…and over time add up to some really large numbers.”

3. The Sales Learning Curve is critical for any SaaS business to climb, and it must be done before you grow your sales force. Stop at three sales representatives until at least two of them are making at least $100K MRR quotas. Often, software businesses grow their sales force before they have a clear model for how the product should be sold. This problem is especially acute for SaaS businesses because of the large upfront investments in IT infrastructure necessary for the service to even be provided. Those precious cash reserves must be carefully husbanded, and not burnt through by a bloated sales department. When several sales reps are able to regularly sign contract values equal to twice their fully burdened cost of sales that is when you are ready to expand your sales force.

4. Both finding new customers and retaining old ones are critical for the health of the business. As soon as you have a customer base large enough to service, add to your sales force (“hunters“) with account managers (“farmers“) dedicated to customer retention. Both sales and account management should be paid on the basis of CMRR growth. This is especially important once a SaaS company reaches the sales inflection point.

The level of sales and marketing investment should be computed using the CAC Ratio, which can be computed with a simple look at your GAAP profit and loss statement. Simply divide your annualized gross margin added over the last three months by sales and marketing costs incurred over that period. A CAC Ratio above 1.0 indicates that you need to invest more money in sales and marketing because your customers are making themselves profit centers within a year. (BTW Monitis CAC is above 1)

You should also pay attention to Customer LifeTime Value, or CLTV, which is simply the present value of the profit stream for a customer, minus the cost of acquiring the customer. Younger companies have little track record and hence can only guess at a customer’s lifetime. BVP uses estimates of 3-4 years of SMB customers, while enterprise customers should stay for 5-7 years. The “Five C’s of SaaS Finance” are thus CMRR, Cash Flow, CAC, Churn, and CLTV.

5. Traditional IT channels, where one tries to sell the computer service to the head of the IT department do not work in a SaaS model, for the simple reason that a SaaS model makes redundant much traditional IT work, and IT managers are reluctant to manage their departments into superfluity. Instead, focus your efforts in business development towards business services channels. This will require additional work, as these new sets of partners will not be as comfortable with the technical aspects of the product, but will understand the power of a SaaS product while many ISVs and SIs will not. Focus on the marketing department, the payroll department, and businesses that need computer services but are not yet large enough to have dedicated IT departments.

6. By definition, your sales prospects are online – Savvy online marketing is a core competence (sometimes the only one) of every successful SaaS business. You sell a product that requires an internet connection and a web browser for access, which means your prospects are online! Numerous studies show that your customers are now doing most of their primary research online, and it should not surprise you. This is a clear example where business-to-business (B2B) marketers need to learn from their business-to-consumer (B2C) counterparts. The most innovative B2C companies are lead generation machines, leveraging search engine optimization (SEO), viral marketing, Search Engine Marketing (SEM), email marketing, and other technically-advanced methods. Yet many B2B companies don’t have a clue.”

7. Globalization obstacles hinder SaaS vendors more so than traditional software companies, which is why you should establish yourself in North America first. After you reach $1 million in CMRR, then research hiring European sales and services executives pushing customer demand. Only consider utilizing Asia for post-IPO. Saas companies consistently address concerns about latency, data access and security by replicated local datacenters, in-country customer support personnel, packaged integration and other regional software and SaaS products due to different structure and service goals throughout the industry (Monitis doesn’t follow this rule although).

8. You should have one and only one version of the code in use. That means you should have one instance of the program, one datacenter for all your tenants, and no on-premise deployment at all. The best SaaS companies follow this advice. Multiple instances and single-tenant offerings are used by legacy software businesses whose architecture cannot be redesigned on the fly, in the way that SaaS companies can. Virtualization can allow you to make multiple instances of your product, but the additional engineering complexity will raise costs and reduce ability to stay nimble. Your SaaS product should always begin by being multi-tenant and single instance. (we also think it is very critical)

9. “Service” is the most important part of a Software-as-service business, not “software”. Detailed usage data is produced by your customers every time they use your service. Use it! Product managers in a licensed software model will spend hundreds of man hours and hundreds of thousands of dollars to just create a vague picture of how the customer uses their product, without ever really knowing how the product was used every day. With a SaaS model, that data is instantly available. Use that data, analyze it, and incorporate what you have learned to evolve your product each and every day into something that the better serves the customer. Companies like Apple, Google, and Facebook have already incorporated the use of usage data into their business model and customer service strategy. Now, SaaS companies can use the same methodologies those companies use on the business of software itself.

Three different levels of Service Savvy exist, and a SaaS business should try to achieve them all. The first level requires basic monitoring to see if customers are likely to churn or can be sold additional products. This competence is required for any SaaS business, and shouldn’t be hard to achieve because you know how and how often your customers use your products. Simply track key usage metrics and determine which customers are getting the best value for their money (these are your up-sell candidates) and which ones aren’t (these may leave unless you intervene). You need to cooperate with your marketers to create internal reports about customers with low usage, and should send emails to customers whose behavior changes so that you can figure out why they have altered their usage of your products.

Second, expect to test and develop your software quickly based on feedback from your customers. Analyze the ways in which customers actually use your product instead of how they say they use it. Certain pages, features, and components get more use than others; find out why and whether they can be used to create more opportunities. Third, analyze all of the data that you collect to get benchmarks for your customers and determine best practices; you can actually help your customers’ businesses grow by helping them use your product more effectively, while your business can learn from the practices of your best customers.

10. Recognize that you’ll need a lot of capital to get started; you have to spend a lot on sales personnel and R&D, and you cannot reasonably expect to make a consistent profit for at least four years. Therefore, be ready for the long haul, and don’t have too many frills in your budget. Many SaaS companies tried to expand too fast, and wound up going out of business after promising starts. A sizable cash cushion should be baked into every operating budget, and faster growth will actually result in more cash burned. BVP believes that second-generation SaaS companies may become more efficient than those in the first generation, but they’ll still need a lot of capital to have a good chance of becoming successful SaaS businesses.

Some rules are meant to be broken, but not all rules are meant to be thrown out the window, you have to be choosy about which rules you break at which times. These laws will help you run your SaaS business better. But even though the best companies are constantly pioneering through their fields, but BVP thinks you can excel even if you decide to disregard one or two of these rules. Several companies BVP has worked with prove that you can break one of these laws and still succeed. But if you are looking at these Ten Laws and questioning more than just one or two of them, you should stop and really examine your business.

There is a new announcement from Amazon Web Services (AWS) which enables us a secure and seamless connection between available IT infrastructure and the AWS cloud. It is the Amazon Virtual Private Cloud (VPC) which is going to provide us these facilities. The existing securing infrastructures like firewalls, security services can be extended to our AWS resources by using Amazon VPC which bridges the IT infrastructure and the AWS resources through a Virtual Private Network (VPN). The integration of the Amazon EC2 computer resources is now possible using Amazon VPC. This can be extended to the integration of the Amazon VPC and AWS services in the future.

When you’re trying to enter and navigate websites, you may not always have a good experience. It all seems confusing sometimes, even daunting, with all the factors that have to be taken into account to make a web transaction successful. We’ve heard of such things as mashups, plug-ins, and mobile browsers. But for the average user, the basics are what count. It all comes down to availability and performance.

Ultimately, errors can be encountered related to the application, database, network, or the infrastructure. These areas require various technical disciplines, so finding a resolution to an outage sometimes requires lengthy conference calls to figure out whom to blame. Calls like this can be avoided, or at least shortened, with better monitoring. That’s why company websites should be thought of as end-to-end systems that focus more on what the user experiences and integrating web operations with a Business Service Management strategy (BSM).

Inevitably viewers will encounter issues while utilizing your website from time to time. Hard errors such as the commonly known 404 message, a non functioning database, network overload, and a loss of connection are fortunately easy to detect and clearly spelled out to a knowledgeable person. Website monitoring and pinging servers can catch these problems easily.

Soft errors are ones that cause the application to misbehave rather than break down entirely. If users have to log in twice, navigational paths are broken, page links and buttons don’t work, or necessary data cannot be submitted, a soft error has occurred. These errors are difficult to diagnose or detect, because users are confused and don’t know exactly what has gone wrong. What can help detect soft errors? Applications or transactions monitoring have the ability to detect such issues. How this works is a monitoring system will regularly execute a defined script that is programmed by the site owner. If there are any problems, the program will report these to the site owner.

Visitors to your site may have many different kinds of problems with your site’s performance. The most important measure of performance is the length of time required for the user to work with the application. Inconsistent performance can be even worse than slow performance in many cases. Users are likely to abandon your site and its applications if performance is unexpectedly poor, because they will believe that your site is broken when it slows down.

Latency or performance of websites can be affected by dozens of factors. These are six of the most common ones:

• 1. User-specific problems such as an obsolete computer or slow connection. There is nothing you can do.
• 2. Overall Internet congestion, which having the proper content delivery network and/or internet service providers can alleviate.
• 3. Server software that is also generating a report or doing something else that is resource-intensive, which intelligent software engineering can resolve
• 4. Insufficient infrastructure to handle the current load of traffic, which must be addressed with more hardware.
• 5. Application-specific problems based on your website or server.
• 6. Database performance that may be exacerbated by complicated data types and business logic operations, which database administrators should deal with.

The fifth generation of computing, the biggest thing since the web is cloud computing i.e., a means where data can be stored in web applications and accessed from anywhere and any browser. However, it is not without a backup plan. You need to safeguard all your data when you sense a storm coming with the help of these tools. Though advantageous with respect to storing and accessibility, it is disadvantageous as it is dependent on an external service to host, update, and maintain your much needed and beloved software. In doing so you place your data on computers that are not controlled either by you or at a single point of access resulting in failure of companies that can be shut down or bought, their accounts locked up, your servers and you become off-line. However, popular online services help you store your E-mail, pictures, files, address book, bookmarks, and journal entries in the cloud computing with easy ways to back up all your information from the cloud to your computer (learn more about free tools for backup here).

Availability (or Uptime) refers to the percentage of a specified period of time during which a computer system is capable of doing the things it is supposed to do. It came into use to describe the opposite of downtime, times when a system was not operational. For a networked system to be considered “available,” it has to have service, host and network working. It must have both connectivity (be physically attached) and functionality (actually working.) Typically, one reports availability as a single monthly figure. For example, 99% availability would mean that the system was not working for a little over 7 hours during the course of a month. Availability can be tested by sending a group of test packets and seeing if an answer is received.

Uptime — Time Lost in a year

• 98% – 7.3 days
• 99.0% – 3.7 days
• 99.9% – 8 hours
• 99.99% – 1 hour
• 99.999% – 5 minutes

Users of Microsoft Windows systems can type ‘systeminfo’ at the Command Prompt to display all system information, including the System Uptime. Users of UNIX and Linux systems can use the ‘uptime’ utility to get the uptime.

IT professionals are responsible for many tasks, but their main business objectives are to: align IT with the business and using IT to increase the efficiency of the business. In aligning IT with business, this requires the IT professional to make certain decisions and determine which actions to take that will best benefit the business. For operational efficiency, this means that while using the same amount of resources, service delivery is improved while lowering the costs at the same time.

In an effort of continuous improvement, IT must work to lower the cost of managing infrastructure. The traditional school of thought is to accomplish this through holistic, comprehensive approaches that are centralized in nature. This is the challenge that must be met in order to eliminate inefficiencies associated with silos and turf wars that result in fragmented IT management practices, and ultimately drive up the costs of system management.

To be effective, the IT system management infrastructure must: 1) Simplify and streamline system management through automation 2) Enable IT to perform proactive system management, heading off potential problems before they result in service degradation 3) Enable IT to prioritize system management activities based on business impact 5) Permit integration of IT processes across IT service management disciplines.

In order to meet agreed upon service levels (SLA’s) the system infrastructure must contain a strong monitoring component. This monitoring component, in order to be effective and efficient, must be done in a comprehensive manner from a centralized perspective. In addition to meeting agreed upon SLA’s, this will allow IT to minimize initial and resolution response times for any and all business critical services.

In the past, IT monitoring infrastructure was either agent-based or agentless, and IT companies were forced to choose between the two. Now, thanks to innovative new technology, the advantages of agent-based and agentless monitoring can be combined into a single, superior system. Using Monitis, IT organizations can choose the monitoring system that best fits their needs and budgets.

Monitis offers a fresh hybrid approach that provides the advantages of both agent-based and agentless monitoring. With the latest hybrid monitoring approach, IT can merge agent-based and agentless monitoring technologies to produce a single, integrated enterprise monitoring infrastructure. It provides the vastly granular monitoring presented by agent-based technology where required, combined with the cheaper cost of agent less technology, where in-depth monitoring is not needed. For example, the IT staff can apply agent-based monitoring on crucial ERP and Web servers, and put implement lightweight presence or agentless monitoring into action on less significant servers and department printers. This provides IT a complete and affordable view of the whole IT environment. As an outcome, the IT Staff will achieve operational visibility into all components of the IT environment, monitoring components that were not previously monitored.