I have a new whitepaper that I want the world to know about.  I’m pretty proud of my new baby; it’s called “Monitoring from the Cloud: Monitis versus In-House Monitoring Software.” As you can guess by the title, I pretty much prove why it’s better to monitor your apps, servers, networks and such via cloud-based monitoring technology versus in-house monitoring software.

To be frank, cloud-based monitoring like Monitis is superior over in-house (even open-source) software because it’s:

• has robust notifications and alerts (which you’ll miss if, again, your network, email server, firewall or router is down)
• is quick and easy to set up (10 minutes, tops versus weeks to months for open-source because you have to set up a dedicated server, database and the actual software)
• got low cost of entry, total cost of ownership (TCO) and maintenance (no dedicated main or back-up servers required ($2,000+ each), no server electricity costs ($1,000-plus yearly), plus no team of IT people required to update the software, as Monitis is updated automatically and is available for all to use)
• allows monitoring from outside your company via a network of global servers versus in-house software’s ability to monitor only within a firewall
• easily scalable to suit your growing computing needs, while in-house (open source) software often fails for any enterprise using over 100+ servers
• “green,” as you don’t burn up thousands of watts of energy via servers and create an ugly, giant carbon footprint
• “cool,” which means we use cool technology such as the cloud and Web 2.0 tools and widgets and so much more.

Like I said, I’m proud as a new parent of my whitepaper, and if you care to have a deeper look, check out this link!

SIGN UP TO MONITIS NOW!!! CLICK HERE

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!

Everybody wants low- or lower-cost computing these days. Add being a good citizen to that list – in terms of being environmentally responsible and greener computing. What you’ve got is a good argument for cloud-based internal monitoring – even more so than using open-source monitoring – which is, in at least some sense, free.

Let me explain.

So, if you want to run Nagios, Zabbix or a similar free and open-source product, you need a server. Nagios, which uses CPU very intensively (due to its architecture) needs quite a robust server – one with plenty of muscle. Now, a typical server could eat up between 0.5 to several kilowatts. If you figure in the cooling costs, UPS and other equipment, let’s safely assume that that server will use 1 kilowatt.

That translates to 24 kilowatt hours (kWh) per day, or 672 kWh per month – for a grand total of 8,760 kWh per year.

Let’s do a bit more figuring here because we’re not done totaling up the costs. Research from the Department of Energy shows that the average cost of residential electricity was 12 cents per kilowatt hour in the U.S. in April 2009, and ranged from 7 cents in frozen North Dakota to 26 cents in air conditioner-dependent Hawaii.So, from this little figuring, let’s make some quick calculations:

8,760 kilowatts X 12 cents = $1,051.20.

That’s the amount of your electricity costs for running one server per year.

A More Cost-Effective, Greener Way

Now let’s look at another more cost-effective way of internal monitoring.

Monitis’ Basic plan costs $98 per year, and Monitis Plus plan costs $384 per year. Neither requires you to have a server in-house. Plus, Monitis barely makes a carbon shadow, never mind a footprint. Monitis’ tiny internal monitoring agent can be co-located on any server within an enterprise data center.

What we’ve looked at so far are infrastructure costs for the two ways of internal monitoring. But we haven’t even yet considered the labor costs to your organization that comes with traditional server-based, open-source monitoring. That typically involves weeks of system set-up time and many hours of maintenance efforts for chores like patching, updating and configuring open-source software. With Monitis’ quick set-up feature, you don’t even need to consider those costs.

Let’s not forget server depreciation costs, too, which will depend on the scope of your IT needs and computing efforts. For a large organization, we’re talking quite a considerable sum.

You may have expected me to say this, but I recommend cloud-based monitoring. But don’t take my word for it. Consider the total cost of ownership (TCO) alone.

For more on cloud-based monitoring versus open-source software, check out an additional blog post on Monitis.

Cacti is a network graphing solution that features data storage and graphing functionality, and it is useful for everything from LAN-sized installations up to complex networks with hundreds of devices. And Nagios is a monitoring system that enables organizations to identify and resolve IT infrastructure problems.

Many companies have integrated use of both of these open-source services. But only one solution is really necessary for both functionalities — Monitis. Plus, while Monitis’ all-in-one, external and internal suite of monitoring tools matches or exceeds any competitor, function for function, there is one critical thing Monitis does that no one else does: monitor everything 100% from the Cloud.

Why is that a good thing? Because by being 100% Cloud-based, we save our clients time…levels of time that they’d never before imagined. What would you do with your free time if you no longer had to manage product updates, maintain your monitoring servers and, as a result, were able to go home on time and have dinner at a normal hour?

Here are some benefits of integrating Cacti and Nagios (not really, rather, using Monitis) without the hassle. You get:

• Monitoring for the cloud and data center
• Multiple clouds, multiple private data centers – one dashboard
• Fault detection, alerting, diagnostics
• Data visualization
• Management tools – tags, colors, sorting, users
• Monitoring from outside and inside of corporate firewalls

Instant data visualization

Monitis provides you with interactive graphs of all the data you need to study to improve your customers’ website experience.

Our graphing feature is pre-loaded with useful default graphs, such as average ping latency on all your servers, or you can navigate through all your data on a per-server basis with the data browser. You can save graphing templates for later viewing, export graphs as images, and overlay or stack multiple data sets.

Monitor your entire infrastructure – and fast

With Monitis, because we’re cloud-based, there’s nothing to download, compile, or configure. And you never need to worry about updates. Monitis tracks the performance of such major cloud providers as Amazon Web Service, and with our Universal Cloud Monitoring Framework, we can sync to other Cloud computing providers very quickly – from Rackspace, GoGrid, Softlayer, and more. Monitis is very easy to set up, and you can start watching all of your servers, networks and applications in a matter of minutes. All you need to do is select what services you want to check, choose what servers you want to check, choose what addresses to alert when a check fails, and hit save. Once your monitor is saved, Monitis will start keeping an eye on your servers, collecting data for diagnostics and graphs, and alerting you when something goes wrong.

We Grow with You

Monitis is designed to work on the cloud, and it’s completely elastic.

It works like this:

• You create a monitor, using a query to target a specific tag or provider
• Monitis starts monitoring based on your query
• Any time a new server comes online that matches your query, Monitis automatically starts monitoring it

Guest Post:

Hello I’m Rick Stivers, and I’m the Director of Network & IT Services for Schoolwires. Schoolwires provides strategic online communication, community-management and productivity solutions to the K-12 education market. Our core product is Centricity, which brings together robust and flexible website management, community management and web 2.0/social network capabilities in a single, user-centric solution.  We also deliver Schoolwires Synergy™, a digital file sharing solution, and Schoolwires Assist™, a service request solution. We currently work with nearly 1,000 districts, over 5,000 schools and over  5 million users across the nation.

 We currently provide four different hosting models.

- ASP Hosted at our Managed Facility through Expedient Communications

- Educational Service Agency Hosted at their own facilities which serve districts in their regions.

- Client Hosted – Self Hosted at School Districts on their own equipment

- Schoolwires Appliance – Schoolwires maintained equipment at School Districts.

Over the past year we have really pushed toward the cloud. We implemented an Enterprise VMware Architecture with High Availability, DRS, and VMotion. One benefit of this push was higher reliability on the hardware side and reduction of our server footprint.

We began working with Monitis roughly two years ago. At the time I was unhappy with the current solution I inherited. It was a solution which required our own server, and was not robust enough for the number of sites we needed to monitor. We did an exhausting search and were just not happy with what we were finding due to the number of sites we needed to monitor and the ROI for many solutions were not cost effective. I found Mon.itor.us, and immediately liked what I saw during the trial process. I really liked the fact that they provided a solution along the same model as ours (SaaS), and that it was priced very competitively. It could also scale to the number of sites we currently had (more than 1200) and where we expected to be in 3 years. The interface was also very user friendly and with the AJAX interfaces felt more like a desktop application than a web tool. The reports are very helpful, and really allow us to focus our attention on the lower performing sites. Monitis allows easy exporting of raw data. This has helped with productivity, because I can easily categorize reports based on hosting type and really pinpoint issues related to the location. I also liked that they were innovating and really willing to listen to feedback on feature requests. One of the real benefits of their solution is that it gives an independent view on our sites SLA numbers. Unlike software we load internally on our network and which increases our cost because it’s another server and application we need to manage.

Part of my job description requires that our sites maintain a certain SLA, and without Monitis this would be difficult to track and maintain. The downtime alerts are very accurate and allow us to respond quickly to service outages. We really value this partnership and will continue to work with Monitis to help improve their product and services. Thank you…

Rick Stivers, the Director of Network & IT Services for Schoolwires

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

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!

What would you venture to say is a truly effective way to uncover network, website and server performance problems?

Consider the little ping. The ping is one of the most useful and reliable network debugging tools. It can be used to perform a bunch of Internet network diagnostic tests, for example, to check if a user can reach a public server, to determine how long it takes to bounce a packet off another site, and to probe a domain name or an IP address.

Add to that a remote capability – enabling web administrators to perform instant availability checks from multiple locations worldwide – and you have a very powerful tool.

We’ve recently added a free web-based remote ping tool to our all-in-one solution of cloud-based flexible IT monitoring services – consolidating backend, application, and cloud monitoring.

Check out more news about our new remote ping tool!

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

When I go to visit a prospective client, I’m often asked to explain why it’s better to have an integrated web server monitoring service to oversee that company’s websites and other public services externally, as well as its networks and server resources internally? Why a single solution rather than two specialized end-user performance and server utilization monitors? Wouldn’t multiple solutions be better apt to handle the many problems that arise?

Well, for one, your IT department will have a much simpler job. A single solution will literally alter the way that IT operates.

Let’s look at it this way. When you’re driving your car to a new destination, you’re typically required to watch a number of things in order to drive safely – for example, the dashboard to check on speed and remaining fuel plus a map to make sure you don’t’ get lost. In fact, to coordinate it all, you have to pull over every so often to check the map, ask for directions if needed, get gas and make sure your car’s running properly.

But if you have technology like a GPS navigator – you get a single solution that handles multiple tasks: a map that knows your speed and current location, and it eliminates the need for you to stop to coordinate multiple tasks. You always know where you are and, by setting your destination, you’re sure about the route you’re taking and how long it will take you to get there.

Think of it this way, too. A GPS allows you to save time and have more fun and less stress on the road. When you are late, you can focus on driving, but if you’ve got more than enough time, you can find points of interest along the way, without having to worry about getting lost.

So, why not consider a single product for monitoring IT networks, one that combines the understanding of delivered service levels provided by external monitoring systems with the knowledge of resource use you get from internal server and network monitoring. You’d wind up with the detailed picture, combined with an accurate assessment of the end-user experience.

Choosing the right, single solution, you can track:

• The uptime and speed of websites from the end-user point of view
• The performance and load of servers, including those that are virtualized or housed on the cloud
• The uptime and functionality of applications such as email, VoIP, databases, business applications, processes, transactions
• The availability of networks, including switches, routers, VPN, firewall, DNS, VoIP

A single website, network and server monitoring service can handle a multitude of tasks efficiently – leaving IT managers to better focus on more pressing issues.