Mon.itor.us is gaining more support from independent developers. Open Source Initiative has released a widget that makes it possible to see mon.itor.us snapshot view within WordPress blog. You can download it from http://www.opensourceinitiative.net/2006/10/12/monitorus-uptime-monitor-widget-for-wordpress/8/

Mon.itor.us earlier released a widget for personalized Google (e.g. see our blog post at http://blog.mon.itor.us/?p=88) and now our users are getting more options. More widgets are on the way so stay tuned!

Mon.itor.us added 5 new protocols in today’s: DNS, TCP, UDP, IMAP and SIP in addition to the previously supported protocols HTTP, HTTPS, PING, SMTP, POP3, FTP. All together, we are now supporting 11 protocols. Still in beta release, we are aggressively adding new features.

SIP monitoring is a quite unique feature of mon.itor.us which will allow our users to check the availability of their Voice-Over-IP (VoIP) servers, which are based on SIP (Session Initiation Protocol). Session Initiation Protocol (SIP) is an application-layer control (signaling) protocol for creating, modifying, and terminating sessions with one or more participants. It is widely used as signaling protocol for Voice over IP, along with H.323 and others. Voice over Internet Protocol, also called VoIP, IP Telephony, Internet telephony, Broadband telephony, Broadband Phone and Voice over Broadband are the routing of voice conversations over the Internet or through any other IP-based network. VOIP is getting more and more popular by business of all sizes since it is more cost-efficient and convenient.

The latest release has many improvements in the user interface, many bugs were fixed, and we improved responsiveness of the service. Particularly, in response to user requests, we made switching between chart and table view easy with single icon click. Also, reporting is easier and more convenient – another improvement based on user feedback.

Please take a look at new post at http://techblog.touchbasic.com/html/monitoring-monitorus-montastic-server-uptime-anyone/ . The author found six more features, in addition to what we mentioned on our site, that make our service unique for him:

1. Cool Google Gadget for this service;
2. Tag each URL (server you are monitoring and then organize) view them by groups;
3. Switch between real-time table, bar chart, and line chart views;
4. View statistics for each protocol, snapshots of all your servers;
5. View from three separate geographical locations (US, DE, AT);
6. There’s some javascript code that goes along with the Google gadget that will let you put your “snapshot” on virtually any web page. 

There are cases when users need to monitor not just one page, but a sequence of actions to make sure the whole application is working. For example do a login and then check the page after login, or add product to the shopping card and check shopping card etc. Mon.itor.us doesn’t do such transactional testing yet (although this feature is planned Q4/2006).

There is, however, a solution, which requires a little programming to be done. You can develop a new page which does such checks on the backend and then return OK or error. For example you can use http/html unit testing packages http://httpunit.sourceforge.net or http://htmlunit.sourceforge.net. Using these packages you can develop code which will send http requests to your page and check the response. Put this page under a new URL and then add monitoring for this page. So every time mon.itor.us checks this URL it ultimately checks the whole transaction sequence.

The main advantage of this method is that you get full control and you can make very sophisticated checks. Also when you change something in your site you know how it affects your controlling page and you can make appropriate changes. Of course this method works if you have such skills, but if you don’t, you may contact us or post a request on http://www.elance.com/ or http://rentacoder.com and get it done fast and at good price. Having such kind of control page is a good idea anyway regardless of monitoring.

mon.itor.us is within the most popular links at del.icio.us in two relevant categories – monitoring (actually we are #1 in the category!) and webmaster links

Recently Amazon released new beta service called Elastic Compute Cloud or EC2 . EC2 allows instantly starting (within 10 min) and running virtual Linux servers and paying on per hour bases ($0.10 per instance-hour consumed and $0.20 per GB traffic). For example running 10 servers during 1 hour or 1 server 10 hours will cost the same $2. Running one server all month will cost $72 + consumed traffic. Each instance predictably provides the equivalent of a system with a 1.7Ghz Xeon CPU, 1.75GB of RAM, 160GB of local disk, and 250Mb/s of network bandwidth.

EC2 makes possible to build highly scalable architecture easily and inexpensively. For example when load increases then EC2 customers can add more servers to the cluster for load balancing. Similarly when load decreases, these servers can be shut stop in order not to pay extra.

Mon.itor.us can help you manage the capacity needs. When you see the site performance degradation, for example during rush hours, you can add more computing capacity only during these hours and then roll back to your normal configuration.

Please leave your comments if you know other or better scenarios of using EC2. I think it really may open some new interesting opportunities.

Many Hosting providers guarantee 99% or 95% uptime. How much is that?

Due to network problem at our hosting provider Server4you.de, we were disconnected most part of Friday, 13 Oct. We apologize for any inconvenience and we are working to move to more reliable ISP.

Due to growing popularity, mon.itor.us is currently experiencing a significantly increased load. Load problems are the best problem to face – it means the users like our service! We are working hard to optimize the service in order to handle the load and do not compromise the user experience. We are sorry that our service will be temporary slow in response or sometimes unavailable. Will be back to normal shortly.

mon.itor.us doubled its user base in September. The same trend was noticed all last 4 months. Almost half of registered users are active and visited the site several times during September.

Mon.itor.us beta service continues adding new features and improving the user experience and robustness of the service. The roadmap looks impressive and many new components will be added by the end of 2006.