It is no secret that there is a shift in how technology is being delivered.  Cloud, Hosted, and Virtual are all buzz words that are flooding our conversations, emails, and businesses.  While it is easy to ignore them, there is a concern in the monitoring world. Here a few questions that might have entered your mind:

• Are we losing control?
• Are all SaaS providers created equal?
• What will my role be, now that our critical applications are moved to a hosted solution?

The addition of Monitis strongly positions GFI Software to solve the unprecedented
IT management challenges arising from the rapid adoption of cloud computing

Clearwater, Fla. – Oct. 25, 2011 – GFI Software today announced that it has acquired Monitis, the pioneer of cloud-based network and systems monitoring solutions. This acquisition further strengthens GFI’s ability to provide affordable end-to-end systems monitoring for small and medium-sized businesses (SMBs) and to be a one-stop shop for managing heterogeneous IT infrastructures, be they on-premise, hosted or in the cloud.

“Today’s acquisition shows our commitment to expanding our solutions, helping our customers succeed in the rapid uptake of cloud-based services,” said Walter Scott, CEO of GFI Software. “As more and more SMBs adopt cloud computing, GFI is diversifying its own product portfolio to ensure we continue delivering the technology that ensures our customers remain leaders in their fields. While cloud computing enables companies to cut costs and streamline operations, it adds an unprecedented layer of management challenges for which Monitis offers a great fit.”

Monitis specializes in cloud-based software and infrastructure monitoring. Its solutions provide time-pressed IT administrators and IT support companies with a complete infrastructure view. With Monitis, users can monitor, test and manage the performance of on-premise and off-premise infrastructure and applications.

More than 80,000 users worldwide rely on Monitis. More than 200,000 websites and cloud-based applications are monitored and maintained by Monitis services, with more than 40 million checks and records created each day.

“Joining GFI Software gives us the capital, expertise and business resources that will enable us to make our products stronger and invest in features and functions that will help our customers’ businesses grow,” said Hovhannes Avoyan, CEO of Monitis. “GFI is a leader in the network monitoring and management market in the SMB space, and our solutions strongly complement one another now and will be increasingly interconnected as cloud computing continues to grow.”

Following the acquisition, the business will continue operations under the Monitis brand and the solutions will continue to be available as free and paid services to customers worldwide. The senior leadership and management team that built Monitis will remain in place to continue driving new innovations in the company’s services.

The Monitis technology also will be integrated into the GFI MAX RemoteManagement™ platform for managed services providers (MSPs). This will enable MSPs and IT support companies to expand their managed services capabilities beyond traditional on-premise infrastructure to remotely monitor and manage their customers’ cloud-based solutions as well.

To learn more, visit www.gfi.com or portal.monitis.com, or send email to gfimax@gfi.com.

About Monitis

A leading provider of easy-to-use, pay-as-you-go, enterprise-class network and systems monitoring software as a service (SaaS) for IT support specialists. More than 80,000 users worldwide have chosen Monitis to increase uptime and user experience of their services and products. Their core product offerings include website monitoring, site load testing, transaction monitoring, application and database monitoring, cloud resource monitoring, and server and internal network monitoring. What makes Monitis’ software different is how fast it is to deploy, its flexible pricing and feature-rich technology that provides a comprehensive single-pane view of on-premise and off-premise infrastructure and applications.

About GFI Software

GFI Software provides web and mail security, archiving, backup and fax, networking and security software and hosted IT solutions for small and medium-sized businesses (SMB) via an extensive global partner community. GFI products are available either as on-premise solutions, in the cloud or as a hybrid of both delivery models. With award-winning technology, a competitive pricing strategy, and a strong focus on the unique requirements of SMEs, GFI satisfies the IT needs of organizations on a global scale. The company has offices in the United States, UK, Austria, Australia, Malta, Hong Kong, Philippines and Romania, which together support hundreds of thousands of installations worldwide. GFI is a channel-focused company with thousands of partners throughout the world and is also a Microsoft Gold Certified Partner.

For more information:

Please email David Kelleher on dkelleher@gfi.com

GFI – Malta: Tel: +356 2205 2000; Fax: +356 21382419.

URL: http://www.gfi.com.

Davies Murphy Group

Please email Brian Alberti on gfi@daviesmurphy.com

GFI – US: Tel: +1-781-418-2403

Copyright © 2011 GFI Software. All rights reserved. All trademarks used are owned by their respective companies. To the best of our knowledge, all details were correct at the time of publishing; this information is subject to change without notice.

We’ve gotten good feedback from our video tutorials so far so we’re going to make some more. Reporting IT performance is one of the tasks of an IT administrator. It has often been a pain, so we tried to design our reporting module to make this process as effortless as possible. You can create and manage custom reports for any monitor or a group of monitors using the Add Report wizard located in the Monitis dashboard. These will show uptime and response time numbers on a monthly, weekly, daily, or custom basis. Once you click add, the report gets added to the dashboard and populated with data. You can select different views, like line chart, bar chart, table, etc. You can export the data as a PDF or CSV. You can also make it a public report with your logo, perfect for sharing with clients. You can also have reports emailed to a list of contacts periodically by going to Reports>Emailed Reports. For added convenience, you have the option of turning emailed reports on while adding new contacts.

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.

A faster web bodes well for the Cloud

Researchers at MIT say that the future of the internet looks like this: speeds up to 1,000 times faster than currently and, strangely, using less energy than what’s needed now. A faster internet, says an article I read, would also make high-speed data access a lot cheaper.

What would that mean for the average user today? A user who has a hard time downloading a 100MB file could easily send a 10GB file, with the web running 100 times faster, according to an MIT researcher.

More importantly, the question is, how would the web get so much faster?

The answer is replacing electrical signals inside routers with faster optical signals, says MIT. This way, much more powerful computer processors, such as 16-bit processors, won’t run into choke points on the web.  “I think the Internet will not be fast enough within three to five years,” said Vincent Chan, an electrical engineer and professor at MIT.

But optical fibers are the technology that will speed things up, and, while they are more complicated to deal with, they are already used widely on the Internet — spanning huge distances and even continents.

This is a grand vision of the future of the web, and one that will no doubt make running cloud computing-based applications even more appealing for businesses. That should spur greater demand, too, for all kinds of cloud services, including monitoring tools that ensure apps are running smoothly.   Check out the benefits of cloud-based monitoring!