Monitis: Cloud Monitoring Blog

The cloud and its relationship to the economy; what an interesting subject.

Some say the cloud is growing because the economy is so bad (well, bad but getting better), and that companies are increasingly adopting the cloud because computing costs are lower (for example, server maintenance costs).

But I like James Urquhart’s contention that the cloud is growing because businesses want more agility in their cash flow. Specifically, what’s so attractive about the cloud, especially to start-ups, is that the cloud’s “pay-as-you-go” model, allows companies to have more cash on hand – to invest, to improve their products, to grow.

Let’s look at this more closely. Traditionally, corporate IT builds or buys an application, usually paying up-front licensing fees. And then the company has to buy the infrastructure on which to run the app. That’s a huge investment, and much of its return depends on the success or failure of that app.

Cloud computing, however, allows companies to migrate from a capital-intensive strategy and replace it with an ongoing operational expense. Plus, if you’re not buying software for apps and such, you don’t have to suffer through version after version until you get the one that works without a hitch. All that’s taken care of on the cloud.

While I agree with Urquhart’s theory, I give credit to the growth of the cloud to the troubled economy, too. I think lower cost computing – whether it’s seen from an upfront investment or long-term savings perspective – is more attractive to more organizations in these days of tight IT budgets and CIO directives to pare costs.

And I offer proof that that theory is correct – judging from the success we at Monitis are experiencing, in terms of growing interest in cloud-based monitoring services of everything from cloud platforms, servers, websites, transactions, apps, etc.

Press Release

San Jose, CA – April 22, 2010 – Monitis, the leading provider of all-in-one Cloud-based network and application monitoring suite, today announced a major new product launch: Java Application Monitoring.

Using their leading-edge hosted software as a service (SaaS) approach, Monitis’ Cloud-based Java Application Monitoring Tool enables IT managers to monitor any Java-based service with JMX hooks, but to do so from the Cloud. This means that in addition to enabling users to see inside a production Java (also JRuby) application deployed in a cloud or in a datacenter, users are free to monitor these processes from anywhere at any time.

Said Monitis Founder and CEO, Hovhannes Avoyan, “This is a big deal. This is a major step forward in the industry and we are excited to be at the forefront of this innovation. With this new addition Monitis becomes a true Swiss army knife for the IT administrators. Our host of useful tools in one simple, easy-to-use package can be configured in 5 minutes and require zero maintenance efforts.”

Monitis’ Cloud-based Application Monitoring Tool provides monitoring, troubleshooting, root cause diagnosis, plus pro-active planning tools such as load generators, scalability analysis, resource usage analysis and more. Specifically, the Java Application Monitoring tool:

• Monitors every metric, log, and configuration for all JMX resources in your inventory
• Identifies problem resources
• Controls all JMX resources on-demand
• Sends alerts on any measurement, log, or security event in your JMX environment
• Integrates fully into Monitis’ award-winning internal and external monitoring suite.

Specific metrics for the Java Virtual Machine (JVM) Monitoring Tool include:

• General JVM Server Metrics
  • Availability and Uptime
  • Object metrics
  • Heap Memory Used, Committed and Max
  • Loaded and Unloaded Classes
  • Thread Count
• JVM Garbage Collector Metrics
• JVM Memory Pool Metrics

Monitis’ Cloud-based Java Application Monitoring Tool can monitor all leading commercial and open source J2EE application servers. The servers which provide JMX capabilities for monitoring include all leading products like: WebLogic, WebSphere, JBoss, Apache Geronimo, JRun, Tomcat, Glassfish, and Resin. Monitis monitoring of Sun Java System could also be done through the SNMP mechanism used by the administrative console of the web server.

As with all Monitis tools, the new Cloud-based Java Application Monitoring tool is designed to save IT managers massive amounts of time. Sign-up and set-up take less than 5 minutes, and with Monitis’ heralded, hyper-intuitive interface, there is no learning curve – an incredible claim given that Monitis is perhaps the most powerful application performance management tool available today. Its pay as you go model makes the procurement easy even for Universities, which may also benefit from academic pricing.

Last but not least, Monitis is making the remote JMX probe agent open source, creating unlimited space open for IT managers and system administrators to gain confidence by extending the tool and creating customized checks.

Java Management Extensions (JMX) is a Java technology that provides the tools for building distributed, Web-based, modular and dynamic solutions for managing and monitoring devices, applications, and service-driven networks.

About Monitis All-in-One Monitoring Platform

Monitis is the only service that provides Cloud Monitoring from the Cloud.  It is leading a new era of systems management tools – the Cloud generation.  Monitis is a 100% Cloud-based, complete, and flexible IT monitoring solution, offered on a Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) model.

Monitis consolidates back-end monitoring, application monitoring, website monitoring, 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. 

Besides Monitis’ enthusiastic and loyal user base of 50,000 customers from small businesses to Fortune 500 companies to government agencies and educational institutions, Monitis has won rave reviews from the technology analyst community. Recently, because it’s Cloud-based monitoring helps companies reduce system downtime, improve the productivity of their IT staff, and reduce operational expenditures, Monitis was named the Most Innovative Start-up for 2009 by The 451 Group at their annual Client Conference.  

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%.

Contact:
Monitis Inc.
Sales & Marketing Department
info@monitis.com
http://www.monitis.com
US & Canada Toll Free: +1-800-657-7949
UK + International: +44-845-527-3346
France + International: +33-48-607-9035
2880 Zanker Road Suite 203
San Jose, CA-95134
USA

Ever since Google was hacked late last year, I’ve been wondering just how much information was accessed and compromised. Well, we now know.

There was a recent story in the New York Times that quoted an anonymous person with direct knowledge of Google’s investigation into the attack, and this person says that the hackers lifted code for Google’s single sign-on system to use its different applications, for example, Gmail and Docs. (Single sign-on software enables users to sign-on just once to all their Google services.)

While Google made major changes to its network security, the incident opened up renewed concern across the industry and among government about the security and safety of the cloud – and how stable and protected is the information stored on there.

I’ve said this before here in this blog, and I’ll say it again. The cloud is a phenomenon that’s not going to be stopped by individual incidents of security breaches. What’s needed is effective industry collaboration to improve security standards, and that’s happening now.

But savvy companies who use cloud-based services and apps should equip themselves with extra protection, such as cloud platform, website transaction and database monitoring services. Until that golden day comes when we’ve finally made hacking a lost profession, you can’t be too safe on the cloud.

Press release

San Jose, CA – April 19, 2010 – Monitis, the leading provider of all-in-one Cloud-based network and application monitoring, today announced the launch of it’s Live-Voice Alert Notification program that will compliment its already existing SMS-, email-, IM-, and Twitter-based notification systems.

Inspired by the repeated feedback it was receiving from IT managers who, because they were sleeping, had missed critical alerts in the middle of the night via SMS, email, IM, or Twitter, Monitis has created the Live-Voice Alert program to insure IT managers world-wide are always in the know. By giving IT managers a simple phone call, regardless of where they are in the world, Monitis’ Critical Alert team will personally inform customers of critical issues the moment they happen.

Using advanced notification rules to set-up priorities, escalation rules, contacts, and more, the Live-Voice Alert program turns Monitis into an even more sophisticated and reliable tool.

Said Hovhannes Avoyan, Monitis’ Founder and CEO, “This is a tremendous gain for IT managers around the world. Now they can be absolutely, 100% sure that they won’t miss an alert. Monitis is innovating at warp-speed to help save IT managers around the world massive amounts of time. The Live-Voice Alert program is another testament to our customer-driven culture.”

Every Live-Voice Alert is only US$0.50 per call, and users can re-fill their account balances on-demand within the application.

About Monitis All-in-One Monitoring Platform

Monitis is the only service that provides Cloud Monitoring from the Cloud.  It is leading a new era of systems management tools – the Cloud generation.  Monitis is a 100% Cloud-based, complete, and flexible IT monitoring solution, offered on a Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) model.

Monitis consolidates back-end monitoring, application monitoring, website monitoring, 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. 

Besides Monitis’ enthusiastic and loyal user base of 50,000 customers from small businesses to Fortune 500 companies to government agencies and educational institutions, Monitis has won rave reviews from the technology analyst community. Recently, because it’s Cloud-based monitoring helps companies reduce system downtime, improve the productivity of their IT staff, and reduce operational expenditures, Monitis was named the Most Innovative Start-up for 2009 by The 451 Group at their annual Client Conference.  

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%.

When it comes to the topic of the Cloud, I’m always reading something about how to do this or that: “7 steps to the perfect cloud” or “Build your dream cloud.” But rarely do I come across advice on what not to do in cloud computing. But just because I rarely see those types of articles or advice, doesn’t mean they don’t exist.

A recent NetworkWorld article, however, provided “a few rules for what not to do with your cloud computing efforts,” and I found several of them particularly enlightening on how to measure end-user and other success metrics. I’ll share a couple of them here and why I think they underscore the value of monitoring services:

Avoid Excessive Centralizing

– While accessing IT services in data centers around the world is the main idea of cloud computing and virtualization, it’s extremely important to be on top of the pace and progress of end-user response times. You don’t want to see too much lag time between when a user presses a key and a response from a server. The user experience has to be fast because it’s so important to cloud computing projects. If you’re migrating to the cloud, you may want to pick a provider that spreads user access nodes around the edge of its network–close to concentrations of end users. This is a great argument for employing monitoring services for cloud platforms and transactions.

Don’t Measure the Way you did before

– Make sure you’re correctly measuring service-level agreements (SLAs) with cloud providers. It used to be that agreements built on IT-centric metrics for cloud-based apps such as IPPM guidelines worked. But now more and more cloud customers want to measure by Quality of Experience (QOE), a metric of how well an application performs from the end user’s perspective. That may be better for IT, too, because IT itself will be the customer in many cloud relationships.

Again, that’s another great reason for considering monitoring services, such as Monitis, this time to make sure your provider is living up to terms of your SLA.

If you’ve been wondering what the iPad will do for the cloud, or what it even has to do with the cloud, wonder no more.

A new poll asked 135 IT folks how they thought the iPad affects cloud computing. It shows that 30% predict the iPad will “further push the value of virtualized infrastructures” so that data can be accessed from different devices. Another 20% foresaw that the new gadget, the debut of which has just been postponed until the end of May due to growing demand, proves that all objects will eventually become “internet appliances” connecting to the cloud.

The next biggest percentage, nearly one in five (18%) responded that storage “will become a major issue,” as people rethink how they store and organize data by using the iPad. Next, 15% turned the question on its head and said that the cloud “affects the iPad more than the iPad having an effect on the cloud.” Another 13% didn’t see any relationship between the cloud and iPad, while a small number, 3%, consider the iPad Apple’s mothership, and so people will trust the brand to adopt cloud computing.

Most of the respondents who recognize the relationship between the iPad and the cloud probably also understand that virtualization plays a key role in the way cloud computing evolves. And people agree that the tablet is the next step to an embedded computer on any object.

My view of the value of the iPad is that, more so than the iPhone, it will make consumers and small businesses think about the necessity and usefulness of the cloud as the modern way of computing – access to the net anytime and anywhere and the most convenient, mobile place to store your data and access apps for work and leisure. And a deeper understanding of the cloud’s vulnerabilities in, in fact, keeping data secure, will lead to further demand for cloud monitoring services so that companies can feel more secure.

San Jose, CA – April 15, 2010 – Monitis, the leading provider of 100% Cloud-based network and systems monitoring solutions, today announced that it has been named to the 2010 OnDemand 100 – the leading index of the world’s most innovative SaaS/Cloud companies.

The 2010 OnDemand 100 is a project sponsored by AlwaysOn, Morgan Stanley, KPMG, and Hewlett Packard to identify the world’s top 100 private companies that are taking old notions of data management, customer relationships, and infrastructure and forging solutions that will lead to industry shake-up and huge value creation opportunities.

“As the digital information created by businesses continues to explode at astronomical rates, the need to store, manage, and share this information is becoming extremely challenging,” says Tony Perkins, founder and editor of AlwaysOn. “By providing innovative technologies that help enterprises better compete in this new era of information complexity, the OnDemand 100 represents some of the highest growth opportunities in the private company marketplace.”

In being named to the OnDemand 100, Monitis has been identified as a leader amongst its peers in developing a game-changing approach and technology platform that is disrupting existing markets and entrenched players. Monitis was selected based on its innovation, market potential, commercialization, stakeholder value, and media buzz.

Said Hovhanness Avoyan, Monitis’ Founder and CEO, “We are thrilled with the news of this award. We’ve always thought we’ve been working on something of enormous value to our clients and tremendous disruptive potential to the market. But when a group like the OnDemand 100 recognizes us among the world’s most transformational start-ups, it’s a humbling honor, indeed.”

This most recent news comes on the heels of being named in November as “The Most Innovative Start-Up for 2009″ by the leading industry analyst, The 451 Group.

About Monitis All-in-One Monitoring Platform

Monitis is a 100% Cloud-based, comprehensive, yet flexible, IT monitoring solution that consolidates backend, 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%.

Contact:
Monitis Inc.
Sales & Marketing Department
info@monitis.com
http://www.monitis.com
US & Canada Toll Free: +1-800-657-7949
UK + International: +44-845-527-3346
France + International: +33-48-607-9035
2880 Zanker Road Suite 203
San Jose, CA-95134
USA

Guest Post:

Hello I’m Rick Stivers, and I’m the Director of Network & IT Services for Schoolwires. Schoolwires provides strategic online communication, community-management and productivity solutions to the K-12 education market. Our core product is Centricity, which brings together robust and flexible website management, community management and web 2.0/social network capabilities in a single, user-centric solution.  We also deliver Schoolwires Synergy™, a digital file sharing solution, and Schoolwires Assist™, a service request solution. We currently work with nearly 1,000 districts, over 5,000 schools and over  5 million users across the nation.

 We currently provide four different hosting models.

- ASP Hosted at our Managed Facility through Expedient Communications

- Educational Service Agency Hosted at their own facilities which serve districts in their regions.

- Client Hosted – Self Hosted at School Districts on their own equipment

- Schoolwires Appliance – Schoolwires maintained equipment at School Districts.

Over the past year we have really pushed toward the cloud. We implemented an Enterprise VMware Architecture with High Availability, DRS, and VMotion. One benefit of this push was higher reliability on the hardware side and reduction of our server footprint.

We began working with Monitis roughly two years ago. At the time I was unhappy with the current solution I inherited. It was a solution which required our own server, and was not robust enough for the number of sites we needed to monitor. We did an exhausting search and were just not happy with what we were finding due to the number of sites we needed to monitor and the ROI for many solutions were not cost effective. I found Mon.it.or.us, and immediately liked what I saw during the trial process. I really liked the fact that they provided a solution along the same model as ours (SaaS), and that it was priced very competitively. It could also scale to the number of sites we currently had (more than 1200) and where we expected to be in 3 years. The interface was also very user friendly and with the AJAX interfaces felt more like a desktop application than a web tool. The reports are very helpful, and really allow us to focus our attention on the lower performing sites. Monitis allows easy exporting of raw data. This has helped with productivity, because I can easily categorize reports based on hosting type and really pinpoint issues related to the location. I also liked that they were innovating and really willing to listen to feedback on feature requests. One of the real benefits of their solution is that it gives an independent view on our sites SLA numbers. Unlike software we load internally on our network and which increases our cost because it’s another server and application we need to manage.

Part of my job description requires that our sites maintain a certain SLA, and without Monitis this would be difficult to track and maintain. The downtime alerts are very accurate and allow us to respond quickly to service outages. We really value this partnership and will continue to work with Monitis to help improve their product and services. Thank you…

Rick Stivers, the Director of Network & IT Services for Schoolwires

So, you’ve migrated to the cloud, or at least you’re considering it, and now you want to employ a monitoring solution. Good decision.

After all, enterprise networks are getting more complex as globalization continues to rage – despite the recession. And outsourcing and the growth of wireless are expanding networks beyond their traditional reach. Consider, too, that IT departments are being asked to guarantee that applications and services run well across both private and public networks.

Beyond that, the rise and growth of virtualization and cloud computing makes the job of monitoring and troubleshooting all the components of a computing network even more of a challenge. Why? Because virtualization removes the hardware from the application and creates traffic more difficult to monitor and troubleshoot. And with cloud computing, apps are not housed on the existing enterprise infrastructure and instead reside over the public network. Because ownership of the issue is now shared between the IT staff and your cloud service provider, it makes it even more difficult to correctly identify and track down performance issues.

So the heat is on; and ratchets the pressure up a notch with CIOs demanding cost reduction and higher service levels. All in all, it means finding ways to work more efficiently and effectively. And the right network management tools will offer you the right mix of products that meet both your monitoring and management needs.

So what kinds of capabilities should you look for in a network management system? In this post, I’ll focus on the generalities, and then in subsequent posts, I’ll discuss specific vendors that might be useful to you.

First, because change is a constant, not only in business but in life, too, IT must keep the network up and running regardless of moves, additions and changes. While network management solutions were once built solely to manage devices, now they’re more complex because they have to manage new types of traffic – such as voice and streaming video which are very latency sensitive. Plus, now that private corporate networks are on the public Internet, there are new concerns that IT must be concerned about – such as traffic levels and security issues.

So, consequently, it’s important to consider solutions that can monitor:

- network traffic

- end-user activities

- applications

- networking protocols

- servers

- network hardware

- virtual machines

- protocols

- cloud platforms

You need these elements for a complete end-to-end picture of network health.

These individual elements are necessary for the whole because, too often, when there are performance problems, the network is the first to be blamed. In fact, the problem could just as easily be an application glitch or trouble with end-user activities. Monitoring provides IT with a more proactive rather than reactive approach – as it will help mitigate problems before they happen and reduce mean time between failures.

Right now, unfortunately, most enterprise IT network departments use many disparate tools to try and improve visibility. Plus, IT departments are too often structured into distinct organizations, and that only compounds the problem because information isn’t shared. For greater visibility, things must change, and IT groups must work to share information in order to be proactive.

Network management suites have expanded well beyond monitoring just devices, and this broader view helps networking engineers determine potential bottlenecks before they happen. Putting the right enterprise network management solution in place sheds light on the entire network and improves overall network stability and reliability.

At Monitis, our end-to-end monitoring system offers:

- True 1 min frequency monitoring simultaneously from multiple locations in America, Europe, Asia and Australia

- The ability to customize and set up your own monitoring locations

- No false alarms – failures verified across multiple locations

- Monitors websites, e-Mail 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.

- Internal server and network monitoring including CPU, Memory, Server Processes, Bandwidth, SNMP, telnet.

- 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

I love to read propaganda. It’s so entertaining.

Xinhuanet, the top news site in China, reports that “most Chinese Internet users believe they will be OK with a no-Google Internet despite all predictable inconvenience.”

So how does Xinhuanet know that? The site cites a survey by the Global Times newspaper, an affiliate of the state-owned People’s Daily, in which 27,000 Internet users were asked “What’s your opinion of Google pulling out of China?” About 84% said they “don’t care.”

Just read how the government newspaper described why Google decided to re-route users to a search site in Hong Kong that it isn’t censoring (on behalf of the government):

“Google stirred up controversy in the world’s media and on the Internet in January when the company’s chief legal officer, David Drummond, said in a blog that Google might shut down google.cn and its China office due to disputes with the Chinese government and unidentified cyber attacks against its Chinese users.”

You can really tell a lot about the slant of a news story by the language used…”stirred up controversy”…”due to disputes with the Chinese government.” How about discussing why Google’s quitting its search business there: the censorship issue?

It remains to be seen now if China will block citizens’ access to the Google Hong Kong site. For now, it isn’t, according to the The Wall Street Journal.

The way I see it, Google, after threatening to leave China over censorship issues, finally took action because of a cyber attack on Chinese dissident Gmail users – an attack believed to have come from China. That was the last straw for Google.

Why do I care so much about this? The protector in me can relate to Google’s actions. As the owner of a monitoring company, part of my mission is to warn clients of hackers and other threats. You don’t want to let your clients down.