Congratulations to Mass-based Gomez Inc., the maker of analytics software for web-based applications! It has turned its first profit and is looking more and more like a public company.

Gomez posted net income of $1.9 million during the first six months of 2009, versus a loss of $868,000 in the same time period of 2008.

Gomez was founded in 1997, but it’s had an $80.5 million initial public offering (IPO) filing up in the air since May 2008. Gomez has maintained that the long IPO delay has helped it learn how to behave like a public company, according to CEO Jaime Ellertson.

Gomez makes software to handle cross-browser testing, web load and performance testing, web performance management and business analytics related to web performance.

It’s always encouraging to hear about smaller tech firms doing well – especially in this challenging economy.

Press Release

San Jose 23 Sept, 2009 Monitis Inc., a leading provider of cloud-based enterprise-class IT systems monitoring platform, Monitis has added a number of enhancements to the user interface in its new release.

With the addition of a bottom toolbar (similar to that found in Facebook and MySpace), the dashboard has been made even easier for IT administrators and web business managers to use efficiently. For example, users can now change the view date of all widgets with a single action, chat directly with experts at Monitis, and review the most up-to-date Monitis news and support information.

Monitis now allows the management of all external monitors from a single, central location. This central management system enables customers to edit network settings, monitor timeouts, change monitoring locations, schedule maintenance, and schedule and set up notification rules for all monitors from a single place. Users are also able to export a list of all current monitors with their names, types, and urls, and have the option to print this list or save it as a local file.

IT specialists had often requested a lighter, stripped-down Monitis version of the charts without flash. Flash often gets switched off by admins for security reasons, and IE-based browsers often provide a better overall experience without flash. Responding to those requests, that option is now available.

Many IT managers and sysadmins asked for plain-text e-mail alerts, simply because they use phones and other mobile devices that don’t support full html format. This is now available too. The subject and body of the e-mail alerts have been simplified, the test name appears in the subject line, and there’s more information about the location of the failure.

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

In the world of the web, we know that there seems to be no limit to what clever criminals can come up with to get people to part with personal, sensitive data.

The latest example comes in 140 characters or less – using Twitter messages. Apparently, subscribers are getting person-to-person messages which say: “ROFL this you on here?” A video site is linked, and when victims click on it…you guessed it…they’re sent to a fake Twitter page and asked to enter their log-in information.

When the victim clicks on the link, however, they are sent to automatically message the victim’s contacts with the same direct message.

Twitter warned of the scam, in typical brief style: “A bit o’ phishing going on — if you get a weird direct message, don’t click on it and certainly don’t give your login creds!”

IT managers should warn employees of this latest scam directed at Twitter users, and I’d include the above advice: don’t respond to direct messages (non-Twitter originated), and you should never enter your log-in information on sites generated by those messages.

Now there’s a central place for Twitter app addicts to shop and Twitter app developers to market them.

I recently read about a new site called Oneforty, now in private beta. It offers 1,332 free and paid apps and services built on Twitter’s API. This is great news for users. They can search for, rate and buy Twitter services there. And it also features lists of the most popular apps on the marketplace, as well as the “best” apps for nine types of Twitter services. For instance, there are apps for:

• Business
• URL shortners
• Image sharing
• News
• Travel

There are some social networking features, too.

Of course, you can buy apps on Twitter’s site, and then there’s the wiki directory of Twitter related sites and apps. But Oneforty represents an improvement in layout and navigation. And I’m not forgetting Twitdom (which has an app database with reviews and ratings). But, as a recent story on Oneforty’s development pointed out, the user interface and marketplace feel of Oneforty seems superior.

Features for developers are cool, too. Each listing for an app or service has a detailed description of its features, including screen shots. Oneforty also categorizes the apps, for example, by business or travel. The listing also identifies the developer who created the app, features press mentions of the site or app and pulls in a stream of Tweets about them.

Curious about Oneforty?

TechCrunch magazine has 100 invites to try out Oneforty. Use the code TC140.

I’m always on the lookout for cool and innovative ways to help developers get their stuff out. Don’t forget; you heard about it here!

Microsoft is facing growing competition from Google Doc’s web-based software, and so it is making its own, new Office Web apps suite available to a limited number of trial users. Office Web is due to roll out next year.

MS is calling the trial “The Limited Technical Preview,” and making it accessible through its Windows Live SkyDrive storage portal, says InformationWeek. Apparently MS plans to start slow, expanding trial usage to Windows Live users as it moves closer to the launch date.

Again, here’s another example of the growing movement to virtual computing and online applications. Benefits for companies include reduced demand on servers, and, for end-users, more portability and virtual access to documents.

If you’re an IT manager, perhaps this is a good time to take Office Web for a test drive. It may help you visualize how virtualization can benefit your company.

A recent article in “Network World” says that domain-name abuse is proliferating, and cyber criminals are stealing from registrars around the world at an unprecedented rate. According to the story, thieves are “amassing domain names by registering them under phony information, paying with stolen credit cards or hard-to-trace digital currencies.” Then, criminals are breaking into legitimate domain-name accounts.

Phony domain names play a key role in phishing and other cybercrimes.

To give you an example of the problem, in the story, ScanSafe researcher Mary Landesman reported that in August she found a handful of Go Daddy domains “were being farmed out for use in three distinct botnet-controlled SQL injection attacks against Web sites in India, U.S. and China.”

But Landesman says the problem’s not with GoDaddy, which manages 36 million registered domains and suspends and kills hundreds each week. Rather, it is with “the entire domain-name registration system, along with the faulty Whois database of registrant information (overseen by ICANN) that contains fake data, even total gibberish.”

This is an important story to read because it highlights the dangers for both server providers and their customers. What we need is reform of the domain-name registration process, and now! Check out the story here.

Learn more about transaction monitoring from our blog post:rn

Web Applications Monitoring Best Practices: Transactions Monitoring

Press Release

San Jose 31 Aug, 2009 Monitis Inc., a premier provider of centralized systems monitoring in the cloud, today announces new important release for its on-demand load testing service. New version of Monitis’ WebLoadTester allows database performance management and load testing from the cloud.

The new release of the Monitis’ WebLoadTester allows generation of the load for popular databases such as open source MySQL, Oracle, MS SQL, DB2 and others from the cloud. Usually it is the database that interferes with performance bottlenecks in the system and often just a single SQL query will be able to destroy the performance of the whole application. WebLoadTester makes database performance tuning simpler and affordable for application developers, database administrators (DBA), performance and quality engineers.

Applications load and performance testing are considered by many to be the “killer application”for cloud computing. WebLoadTester already supports both static and script based http load tests and supports SOAP load testing for service oriented architectures (SOA). WebLoadTester makes the load testing affordable for all kind of businesses. The price per test is estimated to be as low as $4.18 per test with use of the Monitis load tester. A user just has to enter the parameters of a database connection and queries, which he/she is keen to load and test metrics for. With a single click the load test will get started and the performance report will be generated. Then through e-mails it will be sent to users and will be reachable on the web. These tests can be saved and recurrently executed by the users.

Professional Web testing requires effective resource monitoring. Monitis systems performance monitoring oversees utilization of resources such as databases, application servers, load balancers, and firewalls. During load tests, usage information about these resources can be collected and analyzed. When problems arise, you will need information about how resources are used throughout the entire structure of your Web application. “Our goal is to provide our customers an easy and cost efficient centralized performance management in the cloud, so that there is no need of purchasing, deploying and maintaining multiple servers, tools and services.” says Hovhannes Avoyan, CEO of Monitis.

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 in the cloud. 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

Twitter is a so-called “micro-blogging” site that many people use to exchange messages with their friends, but Twitter can also be used for business. You can now get Twitter notifications for Monitis and Mon.itor.us monitoring services. Follow Monitis Twitter page; add your Twitter account to the contacts for Monitis and/or mon.itor.us, and you will be able to get free Monitis alert notification notifications through your Twitter account (make sure you added your phone number to your Twitter account).

Remember: Twitter sends texts to US mobile phone numbers only. Also bear in mind that it won’t guarantee delivery for messages; and due to recent outages on Twitter, we suggest using Monitis’s SMS notifications, or both for business critical applications. Also, using these rules, you may establish rules when it transmits the first notification to Twitter, and on the next subsequent NOK, use Monitis direct SMS notification. Thus, you might save SMS in the event of short term outages but still see guaranteed deliveries in the event of continuing problems. You’ll also obtain Monitis pre-announcements via Twitter long before we send out press releases to the public.

Press Release

San Jose 26 Aug, 2009 Monitis Inc., a leading provider of hosted enterprise-class systems management software, launched a new cloud monitoring service. Monitis provides user-friendly, cost-effective systems monitoring through a software-as-service approach. Monitis’ on-demand cloud monitoring service is now enhanced through Amazon S3 monitoring. This new ability, Monitis S3 Monitoring, lets customers independently monitor their S3 usage and storage, and notifies customers when they reach prescribed thresholds. Monitis thus provides its customers with greater access and control over the cloud infrastructure.

The Simple Storage Service, or S3, is an online storage service offered by Amazon’s Web Services division. Amazon S3 uses a simple web interface to provide unlimited data storage. This was the first web service that Amazon offered to the public, first in the United States in March 2006 and then in Europe in November 2007. Amazon has charged users monthly by the gigabyte, with additional charge for each get or put request and for bandwidth used to send and receive stored data. There are an estimated 52 billion objects stored on Amazon S3 as of March 2009. S3 also includes image and web hosting and a back-up for its storage.

Monitis already provides EC2 monitoring, and now adds S3 storage service monitoring as well. This gives Monitis the ability to show its users graphical displays illustrating the number of objects in each virtual folder (known as buckets), their total size, the number of virtual folders, and the number of objects in each bucket etc. Users can set notification rules for each metric that Monitis monitors. They can choose to be notified by Twitter, instant messaging, SMS, and/or email when any threshold is reached.

Monitis is an independent service that can be used by business administrators and IT managers to monitor and exercise control over their Amazon cloud usage. Cloud computing customers do not typically own the physical assets that store their software. Instead, cloud computing customers usually pay for only what they use, and enjoy the cloud resource as a service. Cloud customers need more visibility into the cloud than other service users, to make sure that their software is running properly. The Monitis cloud monitoring system allows customers this transparency, giving users management and monitoring capabilities comparable to those enjoyed with in-house systems.

According to Hovhannes Avoyan, CEO of Monitis, “On-demand cloud computing is at high demand now and needs for cloud monitoring is explicit. We cannot ignore the request and we provide fast, easy, affordable tool to address these needs”. Users who sign up for Monitis receive access to Monitis Cloud, which is a web-centric on-demand software that does not require any downloads. This is a service beneficial to those who provide IT services, and businesses ranging from small to enterprise-level.

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