Monitis: Cloud Monitoring Blog

A recent article I read on cloud computing risk asks a good, basic question that I think every company should consider when weighing the benefits of migrating to the cloud: cloud computing: Are the advantages of Cloud computing compared to in-house management of data worth the risks or not?

This writer was referring to the security breaches and data privacy violations that have plagued cloud providers, for example, the recent breach of Gmail by Chinese hackers that we aimed at that country’s political dissidents.

Sure, your company can figure out the IT cost savings and efficiencies inherent in switching to cloud computing, and like many other companies, you may even hit your financial goals. But what “cannot be put into the financial statement or projected costs savings are the unknowns in your company’s brand protection should something go wrong,” the writer says. “Other considerations are litigation, insurance (risk) costs, and other service liability claims that could arise.”

The simple fact is that the more information about or from you stored in central repositories and accessed from single-source environments, the more risk that cloud computing suppliers assume. Add to that the significant pressures on companies today to cut their IT costs, determining how much risk a company undertakes managing information and intellectual property.

What kinds of risk do companies assume when migrating to the cloud? Data centers operated by third parties “invite more than just criminal intent, including government oversight, profiling, personal attack, manipulation and legal litigation,” says the article. Government oversight and the mining of data by “big brother” is a particularly scary notion – and the legislation governing this is so confusing and willy-nilly that I’d say it’s a safe bet that if it’s not written down that a government agency can’t do something, it’ll be done.

What shocked me when reading this was the author’s statement that “cloud computing service providers like Google are exposed to legal and financial risks that could lead to their demise.” That’s a pretty extreme statement, and rather than get into whether I think that could happen or not, my advice to any company considering migrating to or expanding cloud usage is to focus more on prevention.

Instead of taking the “sitting duck” attitude, do everything proactively that you can to prevent service interruptions, hacking, security violations and other disasters happening to you.

So, what can you do? An end-to-end solution is what’s needed, in my view, including:

EXTERNAL END-TO-END MONITORING, including:

• Monitoring Frequency – from 1 minute to 60 minutes
• Multiple Check Locations – America, Europe, Asia and Australia
• Custom Monitoring Locations – possibility to setup your own monitoring locations
• No False Alarms – failures verified across multiple locations
• Monitors Websites, EMail Servers, Firewalls, VoIP, Databases, Domain Name Servers, Routers, Web Servers from end user perspective
• Supported Protocols – HTTP, HTTPS, FTP, SMTP, POP3, IMAP, SSH, PING, TCP, UDP, SIP, MySQL, DNS
• Web Page Content check – specify string to be checked for existence/non-existence on web page
• WebMap view – see all your servers and web sites in the single map view

SERVER AND NETWORK MONITORING, Providing Information on:

• Windows – CPU, RAM, Disk Usage, Processes, System Events, Installed Software
• Linux – CPU, RAM, Disk Usage, Processes, Load Averages
• FreeBSD – CPU, RAM, Disk Usage, Processes, Load Averages
• Solaris – CPU, RAM, Disk Usage, Processes, Load Averages
• SNMP Support – MIB browser, OID monitoring, SNMP Trap

APPLICATION (TRANSACTION) MONITORING, Offering:

• Monitis Transaction Recorder – record your web application flow
• Load time of each component of the page – check load time of each component of your web application
• Detailed troubleshooting – drill down multiple layers to find the root cause or component of the problem
• Multi-step support – multi-step application flow support
• Problem alerts specifying failed step – get immediate alerts specifying the step of your transaction where failure occurred
  

CLOUD STORAGE MONITORING Amazon S3:

• Monitor number of buckets – be aware when you reach some number of used buckets
• Monitor bucket size – find out disk utilization of your bucket or all the buckets in total
• Monitor objects in the bucket – find out how many objects exists in each bucket or in all of the buckets

CLOUD MONITORING of AMAZON EC2, RACKSPACE, Including:

• Monitor number of instances – be aware when you reach some number of EC2 running instances
• Monitor instance utilizations – CPU, RAM, Disk usage, Processes, System Events, Load Averages, Installed Software
• Policy specification – allow automatic deployment of internal agent on every new instance

GENERAL MONITORING Services:

• Instant Failure Alerts – E-mail, IM(Yahoo, GoogleTalk, ICQ), SMS, Twitter
  
• Schedule maintenance – define downtime periods during maintenance windows
• Escalation – escalate continuing problems to different staff members
• Alerting periods – specify alerting periods per contacts
• Performance Trends – graphical and table representation of performance and availabiliity over time(Current Day, Last 24 hours)
• History – option of digging into historical data
• SLA Reporting – detailed reporting with SLA metrics(Yearly/Monthly, Yearly/Weekly, Monthly/Weekly, Monthly/Daily
• Public reports – show your uptime to your customers
• Public widgets – show your uptime on your web site
• Weekly e-mail reports – get averages of the week by e-mail
• Daily e-mail reports – get averages of the day at the end of the day
• Monthly e-mail reports – get averages of the month in a monthly summary e-mails
• Time zone selection – adjust alert time zone
• Export results – export results in PDF/CSV in order to analyze them
• Timeout specification – specify timeout acceptable for your web site
• Failures From – specify monitoring locations affecting alerts(OR/AND condition is available)
• Continuous Alerting – get alerts until an issue is resolved
• Notify when back up – enable/Disable recovery alert
• Access Management – provide different level of access to your employees, customers
• Monitis API – fetch all the data directly without web access
• Monitis CLI – Monitis command line interface provides you library for fetching the data from your shell