Monitis: Cloud Monitoring Blog

Next week, from November 3rd to the 4th , I’ll be in Boston for The 451 Group’s 4th Annual Client Conference at the Boston Marriott Longwharf. Monitis will be part of a special group of companies in an “Innovator’s Showcase.”

We’ll have our own kiosk, and, if you’re attending, it would be a great opportunity to say ‘hello!’ I’d love it if you could stop by and introduce yourselves, and perhaps I can tell you a bit more about the cloud-based monitoring services we provide.

Plus, if you stop by, I’d like to hear about your IT challenges and how you’re managing change in today’s volatile landscape.

If you’re a client of The 451 Group, check out their Conference agenda and register! I look forward to seeing you there.

Learn more at our recent press release: Leading Analyst Rates Monitis as a Cloud Company to Watch

According to the Azure Journal, Microsoft on October 15th released the SQL Azure October CTP (Commercial Technology Preview) 2. This CTP represents the complete feature set that will be available in the SQL Azure at PDC.

This CTP has been deployed to one of Microsoft’s go-live production clusters, one that is larger and more powerful than the machine cluster that has been supporting the August CTP. But it is a completely separate machine cluster serviced by a dedicated developer portal.

Microsoft said that accounts for all existing users of its August CTP have been automatically provisioned for access to its new October CTP and environment.

This is one of a slew of Microsoft Azure product announcements and enhancements in recent months.

Earlier in October, the company said that, at launch time, Windows Azure will feature an improved logging system and give users greater flexibility over what information is logged and how it is collected. Its first CTP provided a logging API, enabling developers to write custom messages to an append-only log.

The API was built on top of the event tracing capabilities of Windows. But Microsoft said its new logging system will enable IT managers to collect other kinds of data, too. One example: performance counters. Users can automatically push their logs to Windows Azure storage at specified intervals and in an easy-to-query format.  In addition, users can reconfigure logging on an ad-hoc basis, meaning they won’t have to figure out up-front exactly what data they’ll need to debug problems. That can be decided as needed.

And back in September, Microsoft released a preview of the Windows Azure Service Management API to help IT managers, well, manage their deployments, hosted services and storage accounts. The API preview is REST-based, which means that users can code against in their toolset of choice to manage their services.

Curious? You can find the documentation (along with the rest of the Windows Azure documentation) here.

This Azure API uses X509 client certificates for authentication. Users can upload any valid X509 certificate in .cer format to the Windows Azure developer portal and then use it as a client certificate when making API requests.

This preview API currently supports:

Deployments – Viewing, creating, deleting, swapping, modifying configuration settings, changing instance counts, and updating the deployment.

Listing and viewing properties for hosted services, storage accounts and affinity groups.

Microsoft also made available a small tool, called csmanage.exe, to help IT managers interact with this API and manage deployments.

The Delaware Department of Technology and Information (DTI) has deployed the industry’s only virtualized application delivery solution. The agency needed to rejuvenate its aging application infrastructure, and it wanted to scale application delivery statewide with security and performance. The move involved virtualizing the agency’s old load balancers – not replacing them.

On a Cisco blog about the virtual computing development, Scott Huffman of Delaware’s DTI, explained:  

“We were able to take several of the older devices, collapse them down into one ACE [application control engine] module and virtualize it, and we quickly found that we no longer needed separate hardware. We were able to make virtual instances and were even able to take some of the devices from our previous load-balancing solution and virtualize them in ACE. That was definitely a winner for us.”

 ”Given the state of our current economy, anywhere I’m able to find savings in the IT budget puts our group in a good light. And the fact that we were able to package several of the older devices down into one ACE module was huge.”

Congrats to DTI. I think it’s great that they were able to use both existing and virtual load balancers to save money.

But I think it’s even wiser that they invested in a virtualized app delivery solution instead of replacing old load balancers with new, more powerful ones. They saved money (Isn’t t hat what everybody wants these days?), and they instituted high performance, scalable and secure app delivery.

Regardless of which solution you may choose for your organization, it’s imperative that you keep your sites, networks, servers, apps and databases accessible and running efficiently and safe. That’s why it’s always a good idea to invest a bit more in monitoring systems that keep track of performance 24/7.

I wouldn’t wish rain on anybody – especially not from the cloud, or the promise of cloud computing.

But I wanted to share five hurdles in getting apps to run on clouds, from a recent article I read. Again, I know it’s a bit negative, but I think it’s good to be aware of these issues as the hype about cloud computing gets louder.

1. No one cloud platform is like the other; expect conflicts. Each cloud is different; specific migration, support, cost and capacity issues vary from vendor to vendor. Legacy apps have a lot of integration issues with your other systems. Usually, the integration has to be fast, and there’s a lot of direct database calls from one application to another. That may not work well when one app is outside the perimeter. Beware.

2. Security: the locks on clouds aren’t as fully tested as those on legacy apps. And many companies need to know who is using the apps or accessing the data and whether they’re authorized or not. Also, a multi-tenant cloud is not an option for firms with security or compliance concerns – because the monitoring and control tools have not been addressed. Perhaps a private cloud is the answer for those firms, but they still don’t offer a detailed audit trail that firms rely on to meet financial or privacy regulations.

3. Licensing and interoperability concerns. Neither major software vendors nor cloud providers are making migration of legacy apps easy. They’re built with databases, communications or data-translation modules, etc. So that means vendors like Oracle, Siebel, SAP and others would have to change their licensing to support cloud computing’s model, for instance, paying only for capacity that you use. Legacy apps typically also don’t support the latest technology – except in the user interfaces that aren’t part of their cores, and that’s exactly the technology on which cloud platforms are built.

4. Do you know what’s behind your legacy apps? Chances are, no. You may know your company’s line
of business apps, but not necessarily the endlessly-customized codes, interfaces and forms. Many times, you’ll need specially designed development, analysis and conversion tools to extract data, business logic and security information from legacy apps so they’ll run on the cloud.

5. Migration is mostly manual; few tools will help. Even at their best, the above tools only convert a portion of apps and data, and that leaves the end-user or service provider to deal with the rest. Solutions are in the works, though.

Here’s the link to the complete article on obstacles to converting apps to the cloud.

Press Release

Monitis, the leading provider of 100% Cloud-based application performance, server and network monitoring solutions, today announced that it has been invited to participate in The 451 Group’s 2009 Innovators’ Showcase at its Fourth Annual Client Conference on November 3-4 at Boston’s Marriott Longwharf Hotel. In addition to announcing its new vision and roadmap at the conference, Monitis plans a series of major new network and cloud monitoring announcements during the week that will continue to cement its lead over conventional, software-based monitoring technologies.

San Jose, CA October 28, 2009 – Monitis, the leading provider of 100% Cloud-based application and IT infrastructure monitoring solutions, is one of only 6 companies selected by The 451 Group, a respected technology industry analyst firm, to present its vision: “Monitoring in the Cloud: Monitor Anything from Anywhere”, to more than 300 top executives from leading US enterprises.

The 451 Group, with its focus on analyzing the business of enterprise IT innovation, covers hundreds of stealth and early-stage companies. The 451 Group’s Innovators’ Showcase, a regular part of the company’s Client Conference since the inception of the event in 2006, showcases some of the best and brightest of these young companies.

Participants, who are nominated by 451 Group analysts, present their business plans and demos of their technologies to The 451 Group Client Conference attendees, who include venture capitalists, investment bankers, enterprise IT end users, software and hardware vendors and system integrators. Attendees are given 451 Group scrip to “invest” in the Innovators Showcase companies. The company that receives the most scrip is honored at the end of the conference.

“The cloud is the next frontier of IT operations management,” said Dennis Callaghan, enterprise software analyst at The 451 Group. “With its ability to do performance monitoring, testing and configuration management in the Cloud, and of workloads running in the Cloud, at an affordable price, we believe Monitis is a company to watch in the nascent Cloud management space.”

In addition to announcing its new vision and roadmap at the conference, Monitis plans a series of major new announcements during the week that will continue to cement its lead over conventional, software-based monitoring technologies.

According to Hovhannes Avoyan, Monitis’ Founder and CEO “Our success to-date comes from the insight that launched the company in the first place. Back then, when a few of us experienced just too many late nights stuck in the office due to inefficient monitoring and management tools, we began to look around and see that many of our counterparts were exasperated by the same issues. The Cloud was offering a better way, and we jumped at the chance to change the game.”

One of Monitis’ early customers, Schoolwires will also be joining Monitis during its presentation to discuss the impact Monitis’ Cloud-based solutions has had on his business. Schoolwires has been using Monitis’ all-in-one suite of monitoring tools for more than 2 years. “Utilizing the Cloud, has led to major advances at Schoolwires!” stated Rick Stivers, Director of Network & IT Services at Schoolwires, Inc. “We’ve been able to gain efficiencies, while reducing costs and the net result is an increase in SLA. Monitis is a critical tool we utilize to quickly respond to downtime for the 1,200 plus web sites we manage.”

What:    The 451 Group’s Fourth Annual Client Conference Innovators’ Showcase
When:    Nov 3-4, 2009
Where:    Boston’s Marriott Longwharf Hotel

For more information on The 451 Group’s 4th Annual Client Event, please visit: Innovators Showcase Webpage.

About Monitis All-in-One Monitoring Platform
Monitis is a 100% Cloud-based, complete, and flexible IT monitoring solution which consolidates back-end, application, and cloud monitoring in an all-in-one, central monitoring service. The platform is easily customizable and may be used for managing of all kinds of IT assets such as websites, servers, routers, switches, VoIP devices, DNS, databases, processes and any other IP devices. Monitis provides users with a comprehensive view of their system’s health and performance.

About Monitis
Monitis believes that the Cloud is the biggest thing to happen in IT management since IT management. Having seen this vision early, Monitis is now the global leader in developing this market. It is the first affordable network and systems monitoring solution based 100% in the Cloud. More than 50,000 customers from small businesses to Fortune 500 companies to government agencies and educational institutions have chosen Monitis to reduce system downtime, improve the productivity of their IT staff, and reduce operational expenditures.

Monitis was founded in 2005 by a team of seasoned entrepreneurs and fed-up and worn-out developers who were tired of complaining about the limits of software-based tools, while inspired by the promise of the Cloud. Headquartered in San Jose, CA, Monitis is lead by a team of IT professionals with deep experience running enterprise-grade IT businesses, as well as starting and selling several IT start-ups. Using a global workforce, particularly its R&D team based in Yerevan, Armenia, Monitis is poised to move from strength to strength. At present, it has a loyal and enthusiastic user community of 50,000, and an average month-on-month revenue growth of over 10%.

About The 451 Group
The 451 Group is an independent technology-industry analyst company focused on the business of enterprise IT innovation. The company’s analysts provide critical and timely insight into the market and competitive dynamics of innovation in emerging technology segments. Clients of the company – at vendor, investor, service-provider and end-user organizations – rely on The 451 Group’s insight to support both strategic and tactical decision-making for competitive advantage.

The 451 Group also operates Tier1 Research – an independent division of The 451 Group – which analyzes the financial and industry implications of developments impacting public and private companies within the hosting, communications and Internet infrastructure sectors. The 451 Group is headquartered in New York, with offices in key locations, including San Francisco, Washington, D.C., London and Boston.

About Schoolwires, Inc.
Schoolwires Inc. is headquartered in Pennsylvania, USA.

Schoolwires provides strategic online communication, community-management and productivity solutions to the K-12 education market. The company’s core product is SchoolwiresCentricityTM, which brings together robust and flexible website management, community management and web 2.0/social network capabilities in a single, user-centric solution. Schoolwires also delivers SchoolwiresSynergyTM, a digital file sharing solution, Schoolwires AssistTM, a service request solution, and SchoolwiresShare(TM), an exclusive online client community and support center.

Schoolwires is recognized in the Inc. 500 List as one of the fastest growing private companies in the nation. The company’s on-demand solutions are deployed at nearly 4,000 schools serving an estimated four million students, parents, teachers and administrators throughout North America.

Contact:
Monitis Inc.
Sales & Marketing Department
info@monitis.com
http://www.monitis.com
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UK + International: +44-845-527-3346
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San Jose, CA-95134
USA

Are you an IT manager at a small business? Chances are you’re wearing many hats, one of them being IT. If that’s the case, then cloud computing may be right for you. It’s not just for huge enterprises, you know.

That’s the assessment of a recent article taking a look at the state of cloud computing in India. Even though the story focuses on that country, I think the points are pretty valid for small businesses everywhere.

Cloud computing offers flexibility and cost effectiveness that makes it perfect for small businesses. The reasons: Small businesses have a smaller employee base and lesser resource requirements than big companies. But their big challenge is capital investment – raising the money needed to expand infrastructure. “Cloud-based solutions such as SaaS and Infrastructure-as-a-service (IaaS), which cater to specific requirements, fit the bill for adoption by such organizations,” says the article.

Both small and large companies, too, can depend on cloud computing services for application development projects.

Ironically, it might even be easier for smaller companies – rather than large enterprises – to jump hurdles to cloud computing, according to the story. Why? Big companies already have a large amount of legacy infrastructure, so, until cloud computing is commoditized, “they can’t shift from an all-on-premise infrastructure to an all-on-cloud infrastructure.” So to speak, they’re dipping their toes in and using the cloud for certain aims, for example, data storage.

Also, for smaller firms, there’s the attractiveness of cloud-based apps. The story pointed out that, traditional outsourcing providers are now offering cloud environments where SaaS providers can come onboard and provide services. This is not only a good fit from the perspective of the cloud provider, who has the reach and managed services capability and can use the complementary services from SaaS providers, but it also means cheaper computing for small businesses.

These are interesting angles on how cloud computing can help small businesses, and I’m happy to share the article.

Should your private banking information or secret government files on where the Al Qaeda is hanging out in a cave in Afghanistan be stored on cloud data centers?

While a recent CIO.com survey found 46 percent of IT decision makers are investigating cloud storage services, there are lots of folks out there who don’t think certain types of information have any business there. A recent story on DaaS that I read in a mainstream (non-techie) newspaper quotes Charles King, an analyst with Pund-IT, saying that it’s not right for every type of data. Certain kinds of data will probably never make it to the cloud, the article quotes King as believing, including financial information and sensitive government documents.

Why?

Because privacy regulations and some very well-known data center security breaches make IT managers “squeamish,” says the story. I have certainly seen this attitude or sentiment among some of our clients, and I can understand why. It’s hard to pin down the nature of the cloud – where you aren’t sure where your data is stored. It’s a tough sell sometimes because companies like to know where their data is, and, more importantly, that it is encrypted during every single transmission.

It’s like you and I wanting to know where our teenagers are every night at 11 p.m. I can’t see them in their beds, so how do I know they’re okay.

So will our industry ever come up with a satisfactory way to address the doubts about security from CIO’s and IT managers? Take one area of security: There’s a long way to go before there is a single sign-on capability for all Web storage, although standards such as OAuth (to enable secure data access) are helping. In the story, a CIO at a company using the cloud for employees who need data backup for laptops, says cloud vendors will eventually figure out more secure ways of storage.

It’s as sure as when the IT industry “figured out network storage arrays, shared mainframe access and resolved other once-unattainable complexities.”

Read more about cloud storage issues.

OK, if you’re not convinced of cloud computing’s financial benefits yet, here’s a bit of information that should help convert you. In a recent article on the growing government cloud, I saw that the U.S. General Services Administration (GSA) has achieved significant cost savings by moving USA.gov to cloud infrastructure and services provider Terremark Worldwide.

Just how much? Remember now, this is money you and I, taxpayers, that is, shell out. It doesn’t come from some private corporation’s operating revenue. In the story, the GSA revealed that the annual cost of maintaining USA.gov in the cloud is $800,000. While that may seem like a lot of money, it pales in comparison to the $2.5 million GSA used to spend before the transition. The earlier figure included hardware costs, which the cloud vendor now covers.

Said Martha Dorris, deputy associate administrator for the Office of Citizen Services, which maintains USA.gov, in the story: “We were in a situation where our infrastructure required a lot of staff resources to maintain it every day. [Moving to the cloud] freed up resources, which we have used to upgrade our content management system to give us the ability to incorporate new functionalities and features on USA.gov to make the citizen’s experience the best it can be.”

Elasticity of infrastructure is crucial because USA.gov gets about 342,000 visits on any given day, and traffic fluctuates wildly depending on external events. So, recognizing that it’s important to plan for infrastructure overload and avoid downtime, Dorris added that the GSA recently bought additional space in the cloud to create a mirror image of the site in case the original goes down.

It’s easier, too, to upgrade USA.gov now that it’s operating in a cloud. It generally takes a day – versus up to six months the old way.

Still, despite the advantages of cloud computing, it apparently took the GSA IT staff some convincing to make the switch. “”It was a big change for the technical staff that worked in this environment,” Dorris noted in the article. “We took a lot of time and effort to make people feel comfortable.”

USA.gov was able to transition to the cloud in only 10 days, with one additional weekend of testing.

In this recession-plagued economy, when taxes are rising to cover the cost of more services and greater debt, it makes more sense than ever for the government to make smart changes – in order to be more efficient and save money. Glad to hear I know I’m saving some money, at least to keep USA.gov going.

See also How Taxpayers Are Saving via Cloud Computing

Look to the East, and that’s where you’ll see many of today’s business trends rising like the sun or being magnified like its rays. For example, in Asia, there’s a growing number of companies now using the cloud to access apps and store data.

According to a recent story I came across while surfing the net, independent research firm IDC estimates that cloud computing in Asia is growing at more than 40 per cent yearly. Singapore companies, in particular, are moving from the “early-adopter stage to the early-mainstream stage of cloud computing.” Further, an IDC survey found that 40% of companies in the Asia-Pacific region, including those from Singapore, are already exploring or trial-testing cloud computing apps, such as word processing apps and and photo-editing software. About 10% are already using such SaaS apps.

A Yen for Savings

So, what’s behind Asian companies’ interest in cloud computing? Well, just like their western counterparts, it seems to be cost and labor savings. The story gave one example of a private Singapore firm that pared $1.1 million from its budget – “a massive 65 per cent savings” – by moving computing to the cloud in 2008.

And, just like governments around the world, Asia is switching public service data base storage and services to the cloud.

The article said that Singapore’s Ministry of Education became the latest convert several weeks ago, when it bought an entire suite of Google applications, including word processing and chat functions, for 30,000 teachers. It expects to save more than one-third of a million dollars per year.

The cloud’s unstoppable spread is covering the globe.

Versus

Have any of you IT folks out there ever wondered how Amazon Elastic Block Storage (EBS), a new type of storage designed specifically for EC2 instances, measures up to Amazon S3 on the elastic cloud? Here are some key differences in cloud performance that I ran across in a recent article:

- For a 20 Gigabyte volume, Amazon estimates an annual failure range for EBS volumes from 1-in-200 to 1-in-1000, increasing as the volume rises. So, that means, you should keep a current snapshot on S3, or back-up the contents elsewhere and get to it so that you can restore quickly.

- EBS accounts can have a maximum of 20 volumes unless Amazon requests a higher limit. The maximum size of a volume is 1 TB, and the storage on a volume is limited to the provisioned size. It cannot be changed. EBS volumes can only be accessed from an EC2 instance in the same availability zone. Meanwhile, snapshots on S3 can be accessed from any availability zone. 

- While S3 is subject to “eventual consistency” (delays in writes appearing in the system), EBS has no delays. Also EBS can only be accessed by one machine at a time, while S3 snapshots can be shared.   

- Where performance is concerned, S3 has the higher latency and also has higher variation in latency. In addition, S3 write latency can also be more frequent than read latency. EBS, on the other hand, has lower latency with less variation. It also has writeback caching for very low-write latency.

- Throughput: S3 has maximum throughput (single threaded ) of approximately 20 MB/s (or 25 MB/s  for multithreaded). This is on a small scale. Throughput rises to 50 MB/s on the large and extra-large instances. In comparison, EBS has a maximum throughput limited only by the network, This is approximately 25 MB/s on a small instance and 50 MB/s on large instances, and 100 MB/s on extra-large instances. Yet, as both S3 and EBS are shared resources, they are subject to slowdown under heavy traffic.

- For file listing, S3 is slow and search is by prefix only, whereas EBS has fast directory listing and searching.

See also Monitis S3 Monitoring Debuts