Website visitors have a low attention span. We’ve mentioned many times how crucial it is not to let page load times exceed 2-3 seconds. This was demonstrated by a test done at Amazon which showed that every 100ms increase in load time resulted in a 1% drop in sales. With Amazon’s annual turnover close to $50B, that would result in lost sales of $5B if the site took just 1 second longer to load.

We analyzed our own website, which is based on Joomla Content Management System, and our blog, based on WordPress. We found that even from monitoring locations closest to our servers, there’s a 100ms wait to get first byte. That may sound reasonable, but if the browser is making multiple requests to your website (for media files or javascript, etc.) it reduces full page load times significantly.

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.

Pluggable M3 (Monitis Monitor Manager) Framework

Who needs an introduction about M3? – Perhaps no one!
After gaining some reputation with M3, providing extra-easy integration of any monitor into Monitis it was time to take it to the next level.

Generally speaking, the work flow of M3 was described in detail in this article.

After some thought and design, we’ve decided it’d be best if M3 was pluggable. Pluggable in terms of being able to easily add execution and parsing plugins.
The interface and behavior of M3 stayed exactly the same, however now it is much easier to obtain data from any source and parse the data the way you want it.
Saying that, it was time to put the new design for a test. We tried to integrate the DBI support into M3.
Guess what – it was much easier than expected!

The Internet is a great resource, but it is sometimes too much to wade through hundreds of web pages looking for tips about using Tomcat with a database. So we at Monitis have done it for you! Below are some of the more useful tips found in various places on the Internet.

Monitis is pleased to present the following tips for configuring Apache Tomcat for maximum performance. Apache Tomcat is an open source software implementation of the Java Servlet and JavaServer Pages technologies. Apache Tomcat powers numerous large-scale, mission-critical web applications across a diverse range of industries and organizations.

 In this article we’ll discuss creating a command line interface to query the Monitis Agents and Monitors you have activated for your systems. We’ll provide the source code for the utility in VBScript and we will also be working on a C# version.  We’ll keep things simple for now and start with VBScript and provide a link to the complete source at the end of this article.

To get started we need to identify what information we want to display from our Monitors, what can be easily supported, and what is not supported.  The main parts are the different types of agents that Monitis offers, which are the Internal,
External, and custom monitors.

In this article we’ll focus on the basic ‘framework’ of the utility that deals with the definition of some classes to make working with the various agents and monitors easier, accepting and processing command-line arguments, and a small function library to keep our main script very clean. We’ll introduce a neat little feature of VBScript showing you how to work with include files.

Testing Web Content with Monitis, Excel, and PowerShell

In the last few articles, we’ve shown you how easy it is to monitor anything with the open source Monitis PowerShell Module.  Last time, we covered how to interact with web applications, and before that, you got a small taste of how working in a real scripting language like PowerShell can make it miles easier to add batches of monitors.

Today, we’re going to cover two more parameters of Add-MonitisExternalMonitor that makes it easy to build web content, and then we’re going to build a really simple way to make use an excel spreadsheet to create all of your web monitors in PowerShell.

Monitoring Web Applications with Monitis

We’ve been learning about a lot of cool things we can do with the Monitis PowerShell Module, which is built on top of the Monitis REST API.  Yesterday, we saw how we can use a simple script to monitor as many domains as we want.  The day before that, we saw how we can seamlessly manage all of our monitors.  Today, we’re going to cover monitoring web applications.

As a reminder, start out by running PowerShell, and running the command:  Import-Module Monitis.  Then use the Connect-Monitis command and your APIKey and SecretKey to connect.  From then on in, you’ll reuse your keep for every operation.

Mining External Monitor Results with Monitis and PowerShell

In the last article, we walked thru some of the other commands related to external monitors.  Today, we’ll focus on the one you’ll probably use the most:  Get-MonitisMonitorResult.

Before we get started, please remember to download the Monitis module from Monitis’ github open source repository.  Download it to Documents\WindowsPowerShell\modules, and import it in PowerShell by running Import-Module Monitis.

Get-MonitisMonitorResult gives you results from any type of Monitor.  You use it by piping in the monitors you want.