Generic server monitoring with Monitis & M3

Had I been told to monitor a cat chasing a mouse with Monitis, my answer would have been – “Yes, it’s probably possible”.
With the not-so-recent addition of M3 to the arsenal of monitoring tools Monitis can utilize, it is possible to monitor anything. However this alone is far from being enough. Smart implementations of proper applicative monitoring is what should be practiced.

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!

Often times when implementing a monitoring solution where, and how to get started can be overwhelming.  It can be especially overwhelming with powerful tools, because you can truly monitor anything.   This series of articles will take a look at some strategies to implement monitoring into your company in a stepped approach, as well as how Monitis can make your life easier.

Overview:  Start Small and Go Big!

Getting started with some monitoring tools can be pretty risky and require an investment that you may not feel comfortable making.  You may find out too late that it does not meet all of your needs.  With Monitis and a stepped approach, there is little to no risk in getting started.  Monitis is “Month to Month” and you pay only for what you use.  Getting started takes only a few minutes, but where should you start?

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?

Many servers, especially databases like MySQL, are dealing with hard drive IO on every data insert, so in order to get much performance out of such databases with extensive amount of data inserts, it is critical to tune the IO writes.

Tuning IO is a tedious task which requires many iterations until you eventually reach your goals or see any results.

While tuning IO, I think that tuning for read performance is a different task from tuning for write performance. Combing them both can sometimes be one of the hardest tasks a SysAdmin can face.

I decided to focus on write performance in the first article.

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.

Are you a webmaster or web developer? Want to create super-fast websites?

You may have Monitis’s recent posts sharing tips for improving the performance of Windows Server 2008 and Linux Servers, and we hope that they’ve helped you.

Now, we’re moving on to Javascript — that wonderful — but complicated — technology that enriches sites but can often get in the way of their efficient operation and slow down the user experience. And improving the user experience — whether it’s consumers or sysadmins — is our mission at Monitis. Why? Because it has been proven that optimal end-user experience improves site conversion rates, Google search rankings and web visitor satisfaction rates. What does that mean? Better business for you and your company!

Of course, aside from these series of posts, there are many ways to improve your computing experience, for example, checking the performance of web page loads. Website administrators can use Monitis’ instant web page load test or use continous real browser full web page monitoring. Web load are affected by many factors, including network speed, hosting location, server performance, application performance, web page design and optimization.

Just as we’ve provided a series of tips on how to make your Windows 2008 Server run at its utmost maximum efficiency and speed, Monitis has put together advice on making the Linux OS work miracles for you. Our interest is in making your life easier, whether it’s through informational guides such as these or by continually enhancing our monitoring cloudware with cutting-edge services, for example, new monitoring stations around the world and mobile apps for free server monitoring.

In our first post, we offered Linux Server tips on the OS‘ features and security set up. You might want to check it out before reading on. In this post, we’re going to discuss tips to improve performance based on Linux’s Configuration, third-party applications that work with the OS and miscellaneous areas.

Keep in mind – as you read through these tips – that you can apply them to get your Linux server to run like a fox – not waddle like a penguin.

Just as we’ve provided a series of tips on how to make your Windows 2008 Server run at its utmost maximum efficiency and speed, Monitis has put together advice on making the Linux OS work miracles for you. Our interest is in making your life easier, whether it’s through informational guides such as these or by continually enhancing our monitoring cloudware with cutting-edge services.

With that in mind, here are 20 tips that you can apply to get your Linux server to run like a fox – not walk like a penguin.

Monitis is dedicated to helping you make sure yourservers run smoothly, but we also want to help you put them to work and maximize their efficiency. That’s why we’re presenting here some best practices for improving the performance of Windows Server. First you’ll need to make some changes in its features, hardware, application and other areas.

Previously, we discussed tips for improving Windows Server through its hardware- and applications-based segments.

Today, we’re offering some performance tips based on the features and tools of Windows Server 2008. Here are some best practices for maximizing Windows Server features: