Due to many requests from our users we have changed the registration policy on our forum.mon.itor.us, so now user can login using any username and not by e-mail address.

New feature provides you an opportunity to see only the charts from the locations you selected. You can click on the colors corresponding to countries below the charts to show or hide the chart from corresponding location.

As we have promised to our users, we just added new monitoring location in the US. Until recently users have received monitoring results from servers located only in Europe. Now mon.itor.us users will have larger coverage for web server and website monitoring. We perform monitoring from three geographically distributed locations: Germany, Austria and United States. This will give a more precise picture of the server and site performance and availability from end-user perspective. It also will make it possible to analyze site performance by comparing and contrasting tests results received from different locations.

From now on you can see performance in one chart, although you can also filter by location. Similarly for reports and snapshot view:

By default Tomcat distribution comes with a very naive configuration settings, because everything is set to default.  The first thing that should be modified are the JVM memory configuration settings. JVM is an environment in which all Java based applications are executed. JVM often could be located by analyzing the JAVA_HOME environment variable.

In order to increase the performance of Tomcat you should modify JVM memory configuration settings. By default some predefined size of memory is allocated to JVM, and if you need more then this amount of memory you will not get it. Often the default memory size is 64MB.

By giving more memory to JVM you can increase the performance of your Tomcat. You should use the following command line parameters -Xms and -Xmx to set the minimum and maximum size of memory allocated to JVM. You can check to see if the performance of your Tomcat was improved after those changes.

This week’s mon.itor.us release supports alert notifications through instant messenger (IM). Currently we support AOL AIM, Google Talk, MSN and Yahoo messengers. Users will get a confirmation message before their IM account will be activated and need to click on the link in the message. This validates that the user indeed agrees to receive mon.itor.us messages. One of the advantages of IM notification is that it is available on some mobile phones so site owners or system administrators can be notified instantly about site problems.

A new version of mon.itor.us rolled out live this week significantly improves the e-mail notification mechanism. Now users will receive immediate notifications of test failures. In the previous version the notification could be delayed for 10-15 minutes.

Another major improvement related to system downtime. With the new release notifications will be sent only if three successive system checks fail. The previous mon.itor.us release would fire off an alert after one single test which could happen due to random and recoverable problem in the network. This will significantly reduce false negative notifications. These improvements will be highly appreciated by the systems administrators which will get more robust notification mechanism.

One suggestion we got from our users is to have a forum where users can discuss issues. We decided to react quickly and launched a mon.itor.us user’s forum at http://forum.mon.itor.us . Currently we have 2 forums there – Help Desk, to discuss issues and problems, and Suggestions, to submit new features requests (which we take very seriously). Mon.itor.us users can log-in using their username and password.  A login is required for posting, although forum view is available for everyone.

We added a new Alerts Feed viewer to highlight the recent problems triggered by your checks. You can see the last 2 days events in the RSS viewer. To activate click on the Start button and select “Alerts feed” from the menu.

You will see the following view added to your desktop with the list of test name and time of the test check failures sorted with the most recent event on top. You can also subscribe to this RSS feed with your preferred RSS reader by clicking on one of these buttons (you previously need to click on Subscribe arrow to see these buttons). That way you will see your test alerts on your RSS new reader like when you are reading news from other RSS providers.

Yesterday we found an issue on our ISP network which relates to domain name resolutions (DNS). We are implementing a quick fix today and the amount of false alerts will be significantly reduced. We want to thank our beta testers for pointing out this issue. Mon.itor.us still on beta release but is getting good customer base and stability!