Due to maintenance work on our US server, the data from that location was temporary unavailable.  We apologize for the inconvenience.

Mon.itor.us Team

As Monitis introduced a new check type. Advanced DNS, in this article I would like to provide brief description of DNS and how it works on the general. On the internet DNS (Domain Name System) associates various sorts of information with domain names and translates human-readable computer hostnames into the IP addresses that networking equipment needs for delivering information. The most basic use of DNS is to translate hostnames to IP addresses.

The domain name space consists of a tree of domain names. Each node or leaf in the tree has one or more resource records that hold information associated with the domain name. The tree sub-divides into zones, which consists of a collection of connected nodes served by an authoritative DNS nameserver, the one that publishes information about that domain and the name servers of any domains “beneath” it. A resolver looks up the information associated with nodes and knows how to communicate with name servers by sending DNS requests and heeding DNS responses. Resolving usually entails iterating through several name servers to find the needed information.

Users generally do not communicate directly with a DNS resolver, instead DNS-resolution takes place transparently in client-applications such as web-browsers, mail-clients, and other Internet applications.

You can refer to the following link http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Domain_name_system for more information regarding the DNS mechanism.

Mon.itor.us and Monitis Widgets (or Mongets) are small applications which present live web performance metrics from global and local perspectives. By using Monitis Google widgets, our customers can build customized web performance management applications within Personal Google or iGoogle as it is shown below:

In order to build such tailor-made performance control desktops, user needs to add Mongets to Google using the buttons below, or using Google gadgets directory. User may install variety of widgets like Global Watch, Visitor Tracking, Uptime Snapshot and Perfometer Mongets. After selecting appropriate URL or IP addresses, Monitis or Mon.itor.Us customers will get an acute visibility and control over web ecosystems’ performance. Both business and IT can benefit from the tailored performance desktops. Gaining such visibility and control, Internet marketers, sales, business managers and IT staff can improve their productivity and ROI. Here are some examples of possible applications:

• Internet Pay-Per-Click and search engine advertisement campaigns’ effectiveness depends on site uptime and response speed. Every time when site is not available or slow, the advertisement dollars get lost. Using live monitors, marketers can instantly pause campaigns during downtime and increase campaign ROI.
• Search Engine Optimization (SEO) success heavily relies on website performance and quality. Search crawlers frequently hit unavailable sites, downgrade their ranking and don’t index their content. Consequently, the site looses traffic from search engines. By using live performance data SEO consultants can notify clients about performance issues, in order to increase SEO campaign efficiency. Real time web traffic statistics helps to understand better site visitors and adjust the SEO process accordingly.
• Online sales and customer satisfaction will be dramatically affected from slow e-commerce and web application sites. User experience can be measured by page responsiveness, thus slow load times reduce satisfaction and affect sales.
• IT systems managers can find performance bottlenecks and may react quickly and proactively.
• Users of third party web services may control the providers service level (SLA – service level agreement). You can use our data to complain your ISPs and ASPs (application service providers) requesting better service and meeting SLA terms. Similarly service provider may also watch the SLA and fix the issues even before customers notice.
• Business managers can have at-the-glance view of key performance indicators and thus more control over their business. They can set goals for IT and Marketing and control execution directly.

Currently available Mongets:

Monitis Mongets (for Monitis registered users):

Mon.itor.Us Mongets (requires free registration at Mon.itor.Us):

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17 September 2007 – Monitis, a leading provider of free web monitoring service Mon.itor.Us and on-demand premium performance management services, has introduced a series of widgets, allowing its customers to build tailored business performance monitoring applications within the Google ecosystem. Utilizing Monitis Widgets, companies can achieve transparency and control over their web operations. The Monitis Widgets are free enhancements available to the entire Monitis and Mon.itor.Us community.

Growing importance of web-based applications and services has led to new sets of requirements for monitoring and control of companies’ web systems operations. Using Monitis Uptime Snapshot, Monitis Perfometer and Monitis Visitor Tracking and soon-to-be-released Monitis Global Watch Google widgets, companies can assemble in a matter of minutes a variety of business applications, particularly tailored for:

· Internet Sales and Marketing: Success of online sales, PPC (pay-per-click) and SEO (search-engine-optimization) campaigns depend on website performance. Live website performance metrics help improve search marketing ROI, particularly by stopping ad campaigns during downtime.

· Service Level Control: Monitis widget provides operational transparency within an organization and between internal and external service providers and consumers. Business users may set and check performance goals for internal IT operations, manage KPIs (key performance indicators) and control SLA (service level agreements) from third parties.

· IT Systems Management: : Utilizing widgets-based applications across organizational vertical silos helps expose performance data and encourage participation and collaboration in accomplishing cost-effective service management of IT systems.

· Customer Support: Continuous service status monitoring helps companies provide efficient client support, reduce downtime and increase customer satisfaction.

“Our mission is to provide the best website monitoring experience for our customers.” says Hovhannes Avoyan, founder and CEO of Monitis “Accordingly our vision is to bring comprehensive web performance controls tailored to different user needs”

Any customer with basic Internet user skills can install Monitis widgets on iGoogle, Google Desktop, Google Page Creator, and on their sites that apply Google Gadgets for Your Webpage. Monitis widgets can be found in appropriate Google Gadgets directories or via search.

About Monitis

Monitis is a leading provider of performance measurement on-demand services for small and large-scale web systems. Companies use Monitis website performance quality monitoring to gain competitive advantage through efficient business execution, quality user experience and continuous operations. Monitis services check and measure performance from global and local perspectives, monitor servers, network devices, business applications and even IP communications availability 24/7. The company has a large community of users – more than 11,000 professionals use Monitis and Mon.itor.Us services, and Monitis monitors more than 60,000 sites and devices.

Fragments from Mon.itor.us Monitoring Service post at Scott’s Blog :

I’ve been recording the response time of my hosting company for this website with mon.itor.us This is a service which records the amount of time it takes for the server you host your website on to respond to web page requests. It can then send you an email whenever there is an interruption in service.

This is what I saw today when I checked the stats:

An average of 1.5 seconds isn’t really good enough and don’t even get me started about only getting 93% uptime!

In response to this I have been able to email my hosting company which has subsequently “resolved the problem”…

Also a good advice from Scott:

Don’t make the same mistake I did and have mon.itor.us send your
notification emails to an account hosted on the server it’s monitoring…
Didn’t even stop to think that if the server was down the email
wouldn’t get through! Send it to another account such as gmail instead.

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In this article I would like to explain status codes and other info provided in notification e-mails of Monitis for a services with HTTP checks.

HTTP protocol has the following types of error codes:

2xx – this code indicates success
In recovery notifications you will often get a 200 – OK HTTP response code, which means that the request was fulfilled.

4xx – codes are intended for cases in which the client seems to have errors

5xx – codes are intended for cases in which the server is aware that the server has errors

The most common errors related to the above mentioned codes are:

400 – the request had bad syntax or was inherently impossible to be satisfied

401 – the client should try the request with a suitable Authorization header

403 – the request is for something forbidden. Authorization will not help

404 – the server has not found anything matching the URI given

500 – the server encountered an unexpected condition which prevented it from fulfilling the request

Besides the above mentioned status codes during HTTP checks, you will also get the following information:
Connection timed out after 10 sec. – which means that for some reason monitoring server couldn’t conduct a check during 10 seconds
Connection refused – for some reason the monitored server refused the connection request from our monitoring server
Wrong response HTTP header received – the monitoring server received a response with a wrong HTTP header
Connection lasted more than 10 seconds – the response exceeded 10 seconds, which is set as a timeout for the HTTP check
So there it is, we’re finished with HTTP checks and will discuss the other check types in upcoming articles.

According to Yankee Group consumer VoIP continued at an aggressive pace in 2006, reaching 9 mln US VoIP subscribers in 2006. VoIP is evolving beyond being a residential phone and is embedding itself into web-based corporate solutions like customer care, help desks, click-to-call. At 167%, cable VoIP experienced the strongest growth in 2006.

Network General Corporation released survey findings showing that the communication components are contributing significantly to network traffic .

Nearly 80% of respondents expect the network traffic from the communication applications to increase during the next 12 months. IT managers will be confronted with the challenge of maintaining quality of service. Nearly 40% of companies suffered application performance problems and nearly 20% don’t even know if they are suffering. To reap the benefits of unified communications, companies must put in place the tools to comprehensively manage applications and ensure that quality of service (QoS) is maintained.

Mon.itor.us, the free systems monitoring service, and its sister premium service Monitis are offering features to manage real-time IT performance, including provision of detailed VoIP performance information with dashboard IT service views. In the case of slow or non-responsive service,  users will receive instant notifications replicated via several delivery channels.

The services provides benefits for both service providers and users. VoIP service providers may react quickly and fix issues even before customers notice and deliver service according to the service level agreement (SLA). For VoIP consumers, this service ensures constant connection.

For corporate users we offer advanced enterprise solutions tailored to the needs of small to mid size enterprises. Please contact us at info@monitis.com for inquiries.

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