IBM sampled its clients across many industries to determine how they are benefiting from the CoD (Computing on Demand) service. In general, TCO (total cost of ownership) savings range from 30 to 69 percent. Three of the clients from these cases cited specific benefits of the CoD program: the ability to solve problems that were previously insoluble, implementation of substantially new business models, and faster processing of data at the end of each business day. Small firms have had to rely on voluminous capital outlays and large facilities to provision their services. Such firms have often not been able to acquire such facilities, and therefore the realm of dynamically scalable and virtualized information technology resources has been alien to these smaller concerns. Independent Software Vendors and Internet based companies, however, are now able to access these esoteric technologies through the offerings of cloud computing services. Cloud computing places these resources into the hands of individual consumers, even if they do not have knowledge of the infrastructure that is being used. Moreover, cloud computing resources stay on top of the latest information technology movements, including Web 2.0 computer resources. cloud computing, computing on demand, TCO, software as a service, SaaS, Web 2.0

Technorati Tags: cloud computing, computing on demand, TCO, software as a service, SaaS, Web 2.0

cloud monitoring, monitor cloud, ec2 monitoring, monitis, amazon cloud watch

Technorati Tags: cloud monitoring, monitor cloud, ec2 monitoring, monitis, amazon cloud watch

A Quick Glance

Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2  -  http://aws.amazon.com/ec2/ ) is a web service that provides resizable compute capacity that is designed to make web-scale computing easier for developers and web-based businesses by accommodating them with the tools to build failure resilient applications. Amazon EC2 provides the user with complete control of their computing resources by allowing administrators to quickly scale capacity as their requirements change.  Amazon EC2 allows the user to quickly upscale or down scale depending on the computing needs which therefore reduces the required time to obtain and boot new servers. Using Amazon EC 2 allows the user to pay only for the capacity that was actually used. Developers can use Amazon EC 2′s tools to create applications which are failure resilient and are also protected from common failures. EC2 provides you complete control of computing resources and runs efficiently on Amazon’s proven computing environment.

As an industry leader in the fields of affordable performance monitoring and management software as a service, Monitis (portal.monitis.com) provides services to over 50,000 customers; whose backgrounds range from small businesses and educational institutions to Fortune 500 companies and government agencies. Monitis provides its customers with improved IT administrator productivity, reduced system downtime, and lower operational expenditure. Monitis ensures that its changes to system monitoring and the management landscape furnish its customers with easy to use and manage, inexpensive, and versatile software-as-a-service (SaaS) performance monitoring and management solutions, with deployment configurations of both shared internal and shared external cloud.

Monitis offers software for monitoring and management of large scale web applications. Aimed for the enterprise level and thoroughly developed according to increasing requirements of real-world applications, Monitis products are a premier solution for monitoring of software running in the cloud (www.monitorcloud.com/monitorcloud). The products are available through SaaS) model and integrate well with Amazon EC2 cloud computing web services, including a local monitoring server at Amazon and Amazon payments.

Monitis is the first on-demand management and monitoring system to be offered with Amazon’s payment system through Amazon Web Services.  Monitis customers were way out front in using virtualization and cloud services.  For cloud-based applications, Monitis is a pioneer provider of this software and is keeping up with requirements to monitor and manage the next generation of software.

Why is Page Load Time Important?

It is evident that it doesn’t take long for small increments in web page load time to add up to big costs for online businesses. Did you know that every 100 ms of wait time costs Amazon 1% of profit, and every 0.5 seconds added to search page generation on Google drops traffic by 20%? Application latency continues to be a problem for Web 2.0 companies. To combat this issue, Monitis has added Amazon EC2 monitoring location to its network which will be monitored locally and provide performance data as if it were operating in the customer’s local network. Causes of such latency can be the user infrastructure, the EC2 instance, or the applications themselves.

Having global network coverage, Monitis external monitoring will add extra value for Amazon cloud users  by simulating the actions of end users from several countries across the globe by monitoring and reporting the load time of web content from US, Europe, Asia, South America, and Australia which, in turn, will ensure a seamless user experience in web applications.

Monitis Provides Holistic View for Cloud Computing Performance

Have you ever wondered how companies view the performance and maintain the health of their applications? With Monitis, IT administrators are able to have an integrated performance dashboard with a single consolidated view for performance values from sources such as: external Monitis worldwide monitoring network, client deployed Monitis agents, web page traffic statistics, cloud providers API’s like Amazon, search engine site rankings, and application’s external multi-step transaction monitors.

All these are done to help the company to keep track of their external cloud services as well as monitor their internal infrastructure. This makes Monitis a true software-as-a-service, the first of its kind. Other features of Monitis include the ability to discover, monitor and manage virtual server and software services automatically. All cloud-computing needs are supported by Monitis on demand instant deployment, extensibility and flexibility.

Using the Monitis Amazon EC2 System allows you to do the following tasks:

1. Ability to monitor the total number of running Amazon virtual server instances.
2. In the event of server failures, notifications concerning the event can be triggered.
3. A message can be received when the number of servers using Amazon Compute Cloud exceeds certain limits.
4. Web services, databases, mail servers, TCP ports, telnet, and SSH can be monitored based on user rules for the new servers.
5. Monitors and notification rules are added automatically for the newly launched servers.
6. Server performance and utilization of resources can be monitored once the Monitis Agent is automatically installed.
7. Virtual server’s CPU, memory, storage and processes can be monitored by the Monitis Agent.
8. To prevent and predict outages in the servers, rules can be enabled in the Monitis Amazon EC2 monitoring system.
9. Notices of server failure can be received earlier with automatic server failure notice.
10. Configuration monitoring features are also provided with Monitis Amazon EC2.

EC2 monitoring is a recent addition to Monitis server and network monitoring service. It significantly automates monitoring jobs for AWS cloud resources. It gives transparency in resource consumption, operational performance and performance metrics including factors like CPU consumption, disk activities, and web traffic. It makes use of Amazon API for easy service administration. It has the following winning features for cloud monitoring:

1. Is a lightweight tool and is easy to set up.
2. Has good performance and rich user interface
3. Can be easily adjusted to suit customer needs.
4. Watches the key cloud metrics.
5. Fits better to cloud services than the heavier counterparts.
6. Is inexpensive and uses “pay as use” payment method.

Monitis Cloud Monitor addresses the above issues by polling running instances, recording newly started and terminated instances, and performing actions based on user defined rules. Monitis Cloud Monitor keeps control over running EC2 servers. When the EC2 management software for instance experiences heavy load on the EC2 servers it will launch an additional instance of the EC2 server to distribute workload.  This will cause problems because one does not have control over how many instances of the server is launched and its settings. Monitis Cloud Monitor will provide a user with a poll of running instances after he/she has entered the AWS account details. Monitis Cloud Monitor will record newly started and terminated instances and additionally it will handle the user defined rules. For instance, when an additional EC2 server is launched, the system may alert the user or setup an additional monitor for a new instance of the EC2 server.

EC2 offers virtual server with different versions of operating systems like Linux, Windows and Open Solaris.  Monitis offers agents for all these platforms and it can mechanically set up its software agent for checking server CPU, load, and storage space and resource consumption. It can also initiate external http, ping, and data record or any other monitoring. Clients can prescribe notification policies similar to “warn me when the number of instances exceeds ten”, to ascertain the reason for starting such a large number of instances. Users can also give instructions to notify when CPU consumption exceeds 80% of the capacity, and to add an agent when a fresh instance begins and launch CPU plus storage monitoring. Thus, the new Monitis Cloud service is effective in time management as also in the management of clients’ infrastructure.

Monitis provides the following advantages for EC2 users:

1. Containment of potential run-away costs of mis-configured or faulty auto-scaling of the service by providing customizable user alerts in a timely manner.
2. Automatic monitoring of performance and up-time of EC2-hosted web sites. This is much simpler to accomplish than using external services since URL discovery can be automated as virtual servers come online.
3. Configuration options to seamlessly aler the user as new instances are launched and terminated.
4. Logging of virtual server events and performance history to aid fault-finding and root cause analysis.
5. Application monitoring for each virtual server as well as other server parameters to simplify the management of multiple cloud-based servers.

Monitis combined with Amazon EC2 is truly a perfect mix. The efficiency and the reliability provided by the system is yet unmatched. Any IT developer or site administrator would definitely find Monitis a must for server management. To get more information about Monitis, please visit http://portal.monitis.com.

cloud monitoring, ec2 monitoring, server monitoring, monitis, website monitoring, performance monitoring, monitoring saas, systems monitoring

Technorati Tags: cloud monitoring, ec2 monitoring, server monitoring, monitis, website monitoring, performance monitoring, monitoring saas, systems monitoring

Press Release

San Jose 22 July, 2009 Monitis Inc., a leading provider of enterprise-class systems management software as a service, launches a command line interface for its premiere on-demand cloud-based monitoring platform. Command-line tools will make the job of IT systems administrators automated and productive.

Utilizing the command line is the quickest, simplest, and most efficient way to get a job done.  While many computer users have become dependent on graphics-based programs, the most skilled and accomplished computer users know that the command line (i.e., terminal) is still the best tool for getting the job done.  With a few key tools and computer skills any computer user can take advantage of the benefits of using the command line with the help of Monitis.  Monitis’ Command Line Tools (Monitis CLT) running from the Linux/UNIX or Windows command line allows the user to easily run most Monitis tasks and functions through use of the Monitis API in place of a web interface.

A CLI or command-line interface gives users the ability to interact with a computer’s operating system or software by typing simple commands.  Experienced users, programmers, network and system administrators, and those in scientific fields most often make use of CLI, although those with visual impairments also find the type-based nature of CLI useful.  CLI offers two distinct advantages to users overall:  the ability to script a set of commands to perform tasks or executables and the ability to work faster with fewer commands than a GUI user.

Although Monitis CLT is still in an early version, there are still many services available to users, ranging from a list of monitoring locations, a list of added monitors, performance monitoring results, and top issues in overall tests. They can also build their own workflows using shell scripts. The output can be saved as a plain text file or as comma separated values (CSV). The files can be later opened in Excel or Word for performance or failure root cause analysis. In the future, Monitis will support all the functions available in the web version.

The benefits of Monitis command line tools are amazing.  Whether you are an IT developer or administrator, you will enjoy a number of convenient features.  Easy integration with our enterprise software, automated management duties, use of Excel or Word to review performance data, fast and convenient terminal interface access (especially convenient for Linux/Unix administrators), and the ability to make custom enhancements to Monitis functions, are all part of the experience.  Users can use the web application interface or Monitis portal to download the tools.  Monitis command line tools go beyond existing Monitis iGoogle widgets and Firefox plug-in.  IT professionals will find innovative ways to manage data on how well the system is functioning.

About Monitis Performance Monitor
Monitis Performance Monitor is industry leading comprehensive, affordable, scalable, fault and performance management platform.  Monitis Performance Monitor monitors, collects and analyzes information from websites, servers, routers, switches, VoIP devices, DNS, databases, processes and any other IP devices providing users with a comprehensive view of their system health.  Open sourced Monitis plug-in with powerful API’s allow users to extend Monitis powerful monitoring and management capabilities.  Users can be assured of always on reliable service as Monitis Performance Monitor is deployed across the world providing resilient service.
About Monitis
Monitis is a leading provider of affordable performance monitoring and management solution. More than 50,000 customers spanning small businesses, Fortune 500 companies, government agencies and education institutions have chosen Monitis to reduce system downtime, improve IT administrator productivity, and reduce operational expenditure.  Monitis is radically changing system monitoring and management landscape by providing easy to use, affordable, flexible (deployment configurations include: shared, internal cloud and external cloud), and simple to manage SaaS performance monitoring and management solution. For more information, please visit http://www.monitis.com

Monitis page at Twitter has now more than 1,000 followers!

Links-Checker Service Regularly Monitors and Reports Broken Links

Press Release

San Jose 20 July, 2009 Monitis Inc., a leading provider of enterprise-class systems management software as a service, launches a new free service for website administrators. Links-Checker checks websites links daily and reports broken and dead-end links to users.

Links-Checker is a free service that you can use to monitor your website for dead-end and broken links. Clicking on links that go nowhere is very aggravating for the people visiting your website.  Maybe you deleted old material that is outdated, but forgot that other pages provided a link for that; or maybe you provided a link to some other site that has ceased to be.  There does exist a free service to help you with this problem: Links-Checker.  Links-Checker will read the pages you specify, and check out all the links, and return a report to you about the status of all the links on those pages. This process will be repeated until your entire website has been examined.  You can provide multiple contacts for reporting issues found, so that you can rectify your problems in a timely manner, for the convenience of your website visitors.

It is not easy to keep website pages consistent and working well.  You want your websites to be found in search engines and working well when people are navigating through it.  404 errors occur when broken links are found and hinders search engine success.  Each broken link makes it harder for sites to reach the top of the search engine results.  Search engines will give you a lower ranking if your site has many errors.  Links-Checker will increase your traffic and improve your search engine rank by quickly and simply testing the links from your site. Links-Checker service was among the most frequently requested new features.

“Monitis works hard to give you the best and easiest to use network and systems monitoring software available.” said Hovhannes Avoyan, CEO of Monitis. “IT managers, network administrators, and systems operators will appreciate the time they can save due to our unique cloud-based systems design.   Our services can be configured quickly and are user-friendly, and we help our customers efficiently maintain high uptime. We are also committed to provide free SaaS (software as a service) tools and Links-Checker is new to our line of monitoring services, like free website monitoring service mon.itor.us and the network monitoring service monitorSNMP (http://monitorsnmp.com).  In the near future, we will add more SaaS-based solutions to our line.”  Monitis cloud-based services can make website maintenance a breeze for website owners. Systems faults and performance monitoring, as well as their newest product Lines-Checker, will save for them considerable time and money while keeping their websites running smoothly.

About Monitis Performance Monitor
Monitis Performance Monitor is industry leading comprehensive, affordable, scalable, fault and performance management platform.  Monitis Performance Monitor monitors, collects and analyzes information from websites, servers, routers, switches, VoIP devices, DNS, databases, processes and any other IP devices providing users with a comprehensive view of their system health.  Open sourced Monitis plug-in with powerful API’s allow users to extend Monitis powerful monitoring and management capabilities.  Users can be assured of always on reliable service as Monitis Performance Monitor is deployed across the world providing resilient service.

About Monitis
Monitis is a leading provider of affordable performance monitoring and management solution. More than 50,000 customers spanning small businesses, Fortune 500 companies, government agencies and education institutions have chosen Monitis to reduce system downtime, improve IT administrator productivity, and reduce operational expenditure.  Monitis is radically changing system monitoring and management landscape by providing easy to use, affordable, flexible (deployment configurations include: shared, internal cloud and external cloud), and simple to manage SaaS performance monitoring and management solution. For more information, please visit http://www.monitis.com

website monitoring, broken links, free website monitoring, SaaS, on-demand remote monitoring, page ranking, Internet ranking

Technorati Tags: website monitoring, broken links, free website monitoring, SaaS, on-demand remote monitoring, page ranking, Internet ranking

The acronym LAMP refers to a stack of free, open source software used together to run Web sites and services.  The expansion of the acronym is: Linux (operating system), Apache (web server), MySQL (database), and PHP, Perl, or Python (scripting language).  Though the creators of these open source technologies did not design them all to work specifically with each other, the combination has become popular because of its low cost and the ubiquity and familiarity of its components.  When used together, they are a robust stack of technologies with a wide range of applications.

The LAMP software stack (Linux, Apache, MySQL, and PHP/Python) is very popular with the new generation of Web 2.0 services.  These services provide high uptime and good performance for such applications as gaming, educational and corporate portals, e-commerce and travel reservations, and many others.  However, many issues such as database performance, hardware failure, application bugs, DoS attacks, and others can negatively impact the performance of your LAMP service.  The best practice is to monitor key performance indicators and set up notification rules so that you can respond quickly to failures and limit downtime.

The first step of the process is the simple and installer-free process of adding external availability and performance monitors; we recommend setting Monitis external HTTP monitors for front page applications and important dynamic pages in addition to doing the same for important files such as scripts and flash items.  Furthermore, a simple ping setup allows the user to check if the server is available.  You also have the option to ping the router and firewall, giving the chance to determine where the failure is located in the larger system.  SSH users can also set up SSH monitoring, if SSH fails but the overall system remains active, you can isolate the SSH problem specifically.  MySQL monitoring is an important part as well and the user must make sure it is accessible from the Monitis IP addresses.  DNS checks provide a final preventative measure against early problems with your DNS.

After completing the setup of external monitoring for your application server, you’ll need to set up internal server resource monitoring.  It will help with both troubleshooting and prevention of failures.  After installing Monitis agent on your server (Windows, Linux, Solaris, FreeBSD and Mac agents are available), add the following server monitors from the Monitis web interface: Linux average load, CPU, hard disk space, and memory consumption.  The threshold for average load should be set at 10-15 for notification.  Set reasonable threshold for the free memory and hard disk space monitors as well.  The Apache/PHP and MySQL processes should also be monitored.  Set the threshold for CPU utilization per server and per process (60-70%), especially for MySQL.  It is often the cause of poor performance. Setting low threshold may result in large number of alerts, too high may trigger an alert when the situation on server is already critical.

For a greater comfort level, we recommend using Monitis Application and Transaction monitoring service.  It is very helpful with complex multi-step applications such as online reservations, e-commerce, online banking, and Web 2.0 services.  It is similar to external monitoring, but it is able to check the complete application flow in one check.  Monitis provides the Transaction Recorder plug-in for your browser.  In your browser, you can record a script by navigating through application pages and adding checkpoints.  Upload the script to the Monitis server to have Monitis check your application on regular intervals.  With all of the Monitis checks combined, 100% application uptime for your users is much closer to a reality.

monitis, performance monitoring, LAMP monitoring, open source monitoring, linux monitoring, apache monitoring, MySQL monitoring, PHP monitoring, website monitoring, server monitoring, uptime monitoring

Technorati Tags: monitis, performance monitoring, LAMP monitoring, open source monitoring, linux monitoring, apache monitoring, MySQL monitoring, PHP monitoring, website monitoring, server monitoring, uptime monitoring

San Jose 9 July, 2009 Monitis Inc., a leading provider of cloud-based enterprise-class systems management software as a service, today makes daily systems uptime and performance email reports available to its community free of charge.

Monitis provides leading network and website monitoring software as a service. Clients enjoy real-time performance dashboard and alerts as well as weekly performance reports. In addition, in response to user requests, Monitis now provides daily e-mail reports to its user group. This option will allow users to have daily overview of systems performance without the need to login and load all data in the browser. The new daily email report feature is in addition to weekly summary uptime and performance reports, all adding to Monitis’ unique network and website monitoring service.

Monitis now provides weekly and daily summary emails for both internal and external monitors. Reports include information for websites on load averages per day, minimum and maximum load speeds and the daily uptime as well as ranges for CPU, load average, memory consumption, available storage space per internal server and more. These reports allow for simple overview of overall performance by IT managers as well as customer reporting for Internet Service Providers (ISPs), Managed Service Providers (MSPs) and IT consulting companies.

About Monitis Performance Monitor

Monitis Performance Monitor is industry leading comprehensive, affordable, scalable, fault and performance management software as a service.  Monitis Cloud-Based Performance Monitor monitors, collects and analyzes information from websites, servers, routers, switches, VoIP devices, DNS, databases, processes and any other IP devices providing users with a comprehensive view of their system health.  Open sourced Monitis plug-in with powerful API’s allow users to extend Monitis powerful monitoring and management capabilities.  Users can be assured of always reliable service as Monitis Performance Monitor is deployed across the world providing resilient service.

About Monitis

Monitis is a leading provider of affordable performance monitoring and management software as a service. More than 50,000 customers spanning small businesses, Fortune 500 companies, government agencies and education institutions have chosen Monitis to reduce system downtime, improve IT administrator productivity, and reduce operational expenditure.  Monitis is radically changing system monitoring and management landscape by providing easy to use, affordable, flexible (deployment configurations include: shared, internal cloud and external cloud), and simple to manage SaaS performance monitoring and management solution. For more information, please visit http://www.monitis.com

Press Release

San Jose 8 July, 2009 Monitis Inc., a leading provider of cloud-based enterprise-class systems management software as a service, today made available several enterprise-class systems failure and performance outage notification management options.

Monitis utilizes multiple ways of alerting users of a system failure. While before boasted features such as notification rules, multi-channel delivery via emails, SMS, RSS, and instant messenger, there was a request made by Monitis users to further enhance the system failure alert service. Enterprise-class options have been added to the popular Monitis cloud-based systems monitoring tool. These new additions aide in delivering in depth failure alerts and preventative warnings while avoiding unnecessary notifications during planned down time.

Additional enhancements include customizable alert notifications such as: 1) Configure the time frames for when users want to receive alerts, 2) The number of failures required to trigger an alert notification, 3) Turn on continuous alerting until recovery which prevents users from missing a single alert, 4) Turn off the recovery message, 5) Configure from which locations the user wants to receive notifications for failures, 6) Create contract groups that can be used for alerting, 7) Define maintenance hours for when alerting is not required, 8) Configure scheduled, recurring maintenance hours and 9) Configure maintenance hours by single monitor or group.

About Monitis Performance Monitor

Monitis Performance Monitor is industry leading comprehensive, affordable, scalable, fault and performance management software as a service. Monitis Cloud-Based Performance Monitor monitors, collects and analyzes information from websites, servers, routers, switches, VoIP devices, DNS, databases, processes and any other IP devices providing users with a comprehensive view of their system health. Open sourced Monitis plug-in with powerful API’s allow users to extend Monitis powerful monitoring and management capabilities. Users can be assured of always on reliable service as Monitis Performance Monitor is deployed across the world providing resilient service.

About Monitis

Monitis is a leading provider of affordable performance monitoring and management software as a service. More than 50,000 customers spanning small businesses, Fortune 500 companies, government agencies and education institutions have chosen Monitis to reduce system downtime, improve IT administrator productivity, and reduce operational expenditure. Monitis is radically changing system monitoring and management landscape by providing easy to use, affordable, flexible (deployment configurations include: shared, internal cloud and external cloud), and simple to manage SaaS performance monitoring and management solution. For more information, please visit http://www.monitis.com

Mon.itor.Us is monitoring huge number of websites and we can also analyze which software is used for those web servers. According to our data, the list of 10 most popular web servers software and their distribution is the following:rn