Managing External Monitors with Monitis and PowerShell

In the last article, we got started with how to create a simple external monitor with Monitis in PowerShell.  The command you use is Add-MonitisExternalMonitor.  You’ll have to import the Monitis module first to use it (Import-Module Monitis).

Monitis lets you monitor everything, and when you manage those monitors with PowerShell life gets a lot easier.  In PowerShell, commands normally come in little families.  To see all of the other things you can do with external monitors, run:

Monitis is an amazing cloud monitoring SaaS platform.  It lets you monitor everything.  And we do mean everything.    Monitis has an amazing set of built in monitors that let you monitor every major web protocol, and Monitis has a structure to allow you to upload a custom monitor to keep track of anything.

PowerShell is a task-based automation platform built right into the Windows operating system.  PowerShell lets you perform tasks simple and easily, using logically named commands, like Get-command, Get-Help, or Send-MailMessage.

Apache and MySQL make up the backbone of many Linux based web servers. According to the August 2011 Web Server Survey by Netcraft, Apache currently runs on 65.18% (or 301,771,518!) of web servers.  Similarly, MySQL is the most popular open source database and holds a significant portion of the market share – especially for web content.  This article will detail how you can get at the ‘low-hanging fruit’ in order to make some simple changes that will yield big performance gains.

We’ve been working hard on new features between May and June 2011, so please take a look at what’s new at Monitis during that period.

LOCATION PERMISSIONS
To make things easier we changed our location permission approach. Before you had to explicitly specify our external locations to use and were bound to those locations. Now you specify only the maximal number of locations and are free to use and combine our external locations however you want.

Everyone likes freebies, especially sysadmins. We’ve offered free services longer than premium ones. Monitor.us, our free website monitor, has been up for about 5 years now. This post will cover eight free and useful web tools that Monitis offers for every website and systems administrator.

1. Monitor.us is a free monitoring service that checks the availability and performance of websites and servers. Users can enter all their website URL’s, monitor them from global locations, and receive reports and alert notifications when a URL goes down. Unlike other free monitors, Monitor.us also offers free internal monitoring, so users can check the CPU, Memory and Disk utilization on their servers, among other metrics. This recent post shows how to set up free internal monitoring in Monitor.us. All free monitoring is done at 30 minute intervals and users can upgrade to Monitis for 1-minute intervals. We recently changed the domain name to monitor.us from mon.itor.us, but both URL’s till take you to the free service.

This blog is on the 12th annual System Administrator Appreciation Day. Thank you, sysadmins for all your hard work, long hours and sleepless nights spent on deploying and maintaining servers and other IT infrastructure.

Many of us at Monitis started as sysadmins. It is a tough task. It’s like being a Swiss Army knife – you wear many hats and do various jobs around installing, configuring, securing servers and network infrastructure, among other things. Then, you are expected to keep the infrastructure running 24×7, which sometimes means coming to the office in the middle of the night.

To help sysadmins to automate some of these tasks, we started developing monitoring tools for them. We started with an external web site monitoring service that checks the availability and the response time of your website from multiple locations. Later we added more monitoring services for servers and applications.

Unfortunately, management types often don’t fully understand and appreciate the complexity of sysadmins’ jobs. At times, it is hard to explain the need for sysadmin tools and obtain budgets for them.

To help you with this task, we are announcing a System Administrator Appreciation Day special, a 50% of all of our sysadmin tools. Use SYS50 coupon code at checkout. We will be offering this discount from Thursday at Midnight PST through the weekend.

Sign up now at http://portal.monitis.com/index.php/plans/plan-builder

São Paulo, July 25, 2011– Monitis, the award-winning provider of the world’s first all-in-one cloud-based service that combines web site uptime, server and application monitoring, today announced the deployment of a new monitoring node in Brazil.

This will provide companies whose business relies on the Web, a complete and accurate performance picture from the perspective of both Brazilian and international web site visitors.

The addition of this node brings the total number of Monitis monitoring nodes operating around the world to 16.  Monitis’ nodes across the US, Canada, Europe, Asia, Australia and South America monitor clients’ key IT processes every 60 seconds – offering fast and frequent checks, as well as alert notifications into the health of servers, networks, applications, events, cloud storage facilities, cloud platforms, websites, transactions and other processes.

MONTREAL, July 22, 2011– Monitis, the award-winning provider of the world’s first all-in-one cloud-based service that combines web site uptime, server and application monitoring, today announced the deployment of a new monitoring node in Canada.

This will provide companies whose business relies on the Web, a complete and accurate performance picture from the perspective of both Canadian and international web site visitors.

The addition of this node brings the total number of Monitis monitoring nodes operating around the world to 15.  Monitis’ nodes across the US, Canada, Europe, Asia, Australia and South America monitor clients’ key IT processes every 60 seconds – offering fast and frequent checks, as well as alert notifications into the health of servers, networks, applications, events, cloud storage facilities, cloud platforms, websites, transactions and other processes.

Mon.itor.us is our 100% free website and server monitoring service. It is unique among similar services in that it imposes no cap on the number of URL’s monitored. As a result, we have some users monitoring hundreds, even thousands of URL’s from one account, for free, forever. That’s great, but what if you want to upgrade to our premium service, Monitis? Until now, you had to set everything up from scratch, but we’ve decided to make it extremely easy with a new Upgrade Wizard. It walks you through easy steps that allow you to select the monitors you’d like to keep and/or add in your upgraded account.

It’s time again to bulk up the muscles for the beach. But did you also know that you could add blocs of website monitors using the common, everyday and ordinary Microsoft Excel program?

Let’s say that you want to monitor a long list of websites and URLs with Monitis. Why would you want to do this? Well, you may want to monitor every page in your large website. Or, you may have a load of sites you need to manage for clients. Adding sites to monitor by bulk in just plain convenient!

This article will show you how easy it is to add several monitors in bulk to your Monitis account — quickly and easily running a script from your Windows desktop.

Okay. So, the key here is to assemble the names of the sites and their parameters that you’re targeting in a list in an Excel file. Then export the contents in CSV and let a script configure the monitors for you automatically. It’s that simple!