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?

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.

Today we are launching something that we think is truly groundbreaking: Free Internal Monitoring. Now users of Mon.itor.Us, the free Monitis, can download our internal agents into Windows and Linux servers and monitor CPU, Memory, Disk, Load Average, MySQL, Processes, HTTP, Ping, and even SNMP, for free. Best of all, since we are a hosted service, all the performance data gets pushed to our cloud and you can access/manage it from anywhere. We hope IT Managers will enjoy free usage of software that’s typically very expensive. Here’s how to get started on a Windows machine.

We’re hard at work improving the usability of our monitoring service. Here are some new features.

1. Downtime in Notification Alerts. We added downtime to notification alerts to provide instant visibility into how long an issue has been taking place.

2. SLA reports show one result for ALL selection. To exclude network fluctuations from site performance related metrics we changed the calculation method in SLA reports. Now, if you request consolidated SLA for all locations, you will get SLA from the best performing location.

At Monitis we take feedback very seriously. Over the past couple months we’ve been
hard at work adding new features and improving user experience based on requests
from our users. We’ve had a lot of requests for new reports, so we’ve added a lot of
functionality there. We’ve also simplified the dashboard to make it easier to find things.
Here are some of the enhancements.

1. New top menu layout for improved usability. We reduced the number of menu items to six, so hopefully things will be easier to find.

2. New HTML-based tabular views for extended support of Flash-disabled browsers.

3. New special management reports: We’ve added an Uptime Report, Performance Report, and SLA Reports for External, Fullpage and Transaction monitors. These show performance for the last day, week and month. Easily share with one-click email, PDF, or CSV. We recently made a video tutorial that goes over these and other reporting features.

We’ve been hard at work adding commonly requested features to Monitis. These most recent updates include enhanced notification, reporting, and API features.
1. URL Callback – Until now you could add an email address, phone number or IM screen name to receive alerts. Now you can provide a custom callback URL which will be called when there are failures. You can analyze the alert on your side or make it interface with your ticketing system.

2. Outage Reports – A single view that shows all your downtimes during within a specified interval. It basically shows the hourly status of a monitor in any time period. Very useful. It can be added at Add Report->Outage Report.

3. Data export – Now you can export data from Transaction and Full Page monitors in CSV and PDF formats. Simply go into the settings view for the corresponding monitor by clicking the pen icon, select the format and click Export.

4. Search in tab menu – If you have many tabs in your account, you can now easily search for them instead of sifting through all of them to find one.

5. Tweet your uptime – If you’ve got it, flaunt it. Wise words. Now you can share your site’s daily or weekly uptime performance in Twitter by clicking the ‘t’ icon in the header of your monitor.

6. Snapshots for internal Ping and HTTP – See the current status of all you internal pings and HTTP tests in a single view. Add them from Snapshot menu.

7. At least option changes – Until now you could receive alerts when all locations failed or at least 1. Now you can specify the minimum number of locations to be failed in order to receive alerts, e.g. at least 3 or 5.

8. Basic Authentication support – You can check the content of web pages that are behind basic authentication. Simply enable content matching and basic authentication options will appear when adding a new external monitor.

9. Monitis API – The API has been improved with more read and write functionality and and improved documentation.

To take full advantage of these features sign up for a free trial of Monitis.

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.

Monitoring your site’s uptime is important, but it’s just as important to know the cause of downtime. That’s why Monitis offers internal monitoring, so you can know which processes on your server crashed before your site went down. Traffic monitoring also gives you insight into your website’s performance by allowing you to correlate the number of website visitors to response time. There are lots of tools available for monitoring traffic, but it’s harder to see their numbers side by side with monitoring data. Our new tutorial shows how to set up and view a traffic monitor. To view this and other tutorials or request a live demo, check our Demo page, and subscribe to our Youtube channel.

To get started, simply go to Add Monitor>Traffic Monitor, enter the URL you’d like to track visits for, and a bit of javascript code will appear. Cut and paste this code at the end of the body section of your HTML source code. Now Monitis will record the number of visits you get each hour. You can see this data on your dashboard in a table or bar chart. You can also create a report to analyze daily, weekly, or monthly trends.

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.