Monitis: Cloud Monitoring Blog

The Google I/O Conference in San Francisco rendered a surprise announcement today that I think will benefit companies who want a more productive and flexible cloud experience. That’ll draw more companies to the cloud and in turn benefit the entire industry.

Google and VMware, the industry’s big name in virtualization and cloud infrastructure, will collaborate to make solutions for enterprise software developers to build, deploy and manage applications in the cloud – in whatever form, public, private or hybrid. The plan is to work together on technology and expertise that will accelerate adoption of cloud computing.

“Companies are actively looking to move toward cloud computing. They are certainly attracted by the economic advantages associated with cloud, but increasingly are focused on the business agility and innovation promised by cloud computing,” said Paul Maritz, president and CEO of VMware, in a story that I read on MarketWatch. “VMware and Google are aligning to reassure our mutual customers and the Java community that choice and portability are of utmost importance to both companies. We will work to ensure that modern applications can run smoothly within the firewalls of a company’s datacenter or out in the public cloud environment.”

What this alliance means is that cloud applications, at least through the projects worked on by VMware and Google, will become more productive, portable, and flexible. And Java developers will have more power to build rich web applications, use Google and VMware performance tools on cloud apps, and deployments of Spring Java applications on Google App Engine.

“Developers are looking for faster ways to build and run great web applications, and businesses want platforms that are open and flexible,” said Vic Gundotra, Google vice president of developer platforms. “By working with VMware to bring cloud portability to the enterprise, we are making it easy for developers to deploy rich Java applications in the environments of their choice.”

To top it all off, Spring, Google App Engine, and SpringSource Tool Suite Google is announcing support for Spring Java apps on Google App Engine to make it easy to build, run, and manage applications for the cloud, and to make them portable across clouds, too.

This is great news for companies that use cloud apps with Java, and even better news is now they can independently monitor those Java-based apps via Monitis’s cloud-based Java monitoring tool. Monitis’s 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 Applicaton 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.

There is some great reporting coming out of InterOp IT Expo in Las Vegas this week.

One observation I think is right on the mark is that the demands on networking are going through the roof as consumers and businesses increasingly take to the lure of new and improved technologies.

Capacity needs are climbing – not just from growing use of cloud tools and services, such as systems, transaction, cloud performance and other monitoring, but also from the ever-growing ranks of iPod users, virtual desktop users and the popularity of favorites like Salesforce.com SaaS.

PCMag’s blog writes that the show looks like it’s more crowded than it has been over the last few years (Good news for the convention industry and Las Vegas!), with a lot of presence from companies like F5, Riverbed and Bluecoat talking about their traditional networking solutions. Security, network traffic, and WAN acceleration were big topics.

But also among the buzz was cloud talk. HP had one of the biggest booths (and a second booth, actually, because of its recent acquisition of 3Com), and HP’s CTO for networking, Paul Congdon, talked about the role of the cloud in merging the two firms. He said HP’s focus is flexibility. In other words – using the same components to allow different companies to control different parts of the network. Converged infrastructures will clearly make it easier for large firms to build their own cloud platforms.

Software vendors were plentiful, too, and the topic du jour was apparently network management and virtualization. Both Citirix and VMware hawked their desktop virtualization tools – Xen Desktop and VMware View, respectively.

I predict we’ll see continued dependence on networks as the cloud industry grows – just as commerce has grown dependent on oil to run smoothly and relatively cheaply (and I hate to make this comparison as an oil slick wreaks disaster in the Gulf of Mexico). That’s why it’s so important to implement a system that continually monitors servers and networks. You don’t want to lose business to competitors or make your employees miserable with unnecessary computing problems!

On June 15, the world will get to buy Microsoft’s Office 2010 productivity suite. Yes, there are a lot of improvements to the package, which includes Word, Excel, PowerPoint and Outlook. I read somewhere that there’s more than 100 upgrades from the 2007 version.

But the biggest buzz about Office 2010 is the cloud computing option – which Microsoft has developed to compete with the growingly popular cloud-based Google Apps (Now boasting 25 million users!).

Microsoft hopes current users of Office will upgrade because of Web Apps, a cloud-based platform that is designed to integrate with Office’s desktop programs. Web Apps will let users upload their documents from their computers to Microsoft’s cloud-based Docs.com, allowing for accessibility from any machine or device anywhere with a web connection.

Yet Google will be a tough act for Microsoft to follow. Even though Office Word is the world’s most popular document editing software out there, Google has been dominating the cloud for years. And what I find a brilliant marketing move, the company is targeting educational institutions…and signing them, too, for use of Gmail and Docs as primary mail and document management tools.

The proof of Google’s success? I believe Google has something like 60% of U.S. schools as customers now – with about 8 million users. The apps represent a low-cost way for students and faculty to create and collaborate on documents.

No matter which cloud-computing app companies and schools choose, many are recognizing the importance of monitoring how those apps perform. That’s why they’re turning to monitoring software like Monitis, which resides and operates on the cloud, to keep 24/7 watch over how the cloud platforms that support those apps are running. Schools, like businesses, depend on notifications that monitoring tools provide to help them spot and address issues with their service providers.

Recently, I read a blog about customer relationship management (CRM), and it brought out a lot of great points about how cloud computing makes a lot of sense for small businesses.

Cost Savings, Minimizing Expenditures

First, start-ups see the technology as an end-to-end solution that presents multiple cost savings opportunities. For example, start-ups may not be sure of when their business volume will go up or down, but the cloud allows them the opportunity to pay only for the server capacity that they need. So, they can scale up or down as necessary.

Another cloud benefit for smaller firms is that they don’t need to put out a huge amount of capital to support servers – for example, housing, cooling and maintaining them. Instead, they can focus more on selling their products.

Training/Education

Cloud-based applications are customizable and extremely user-friendly, and companies don’t have to waste a lot of time training employees to use the system and subsequent upgrades. The cloud also gives companies a chance to let their IT folks do more strategic work – like planning for the future growth of computing needs – rather than running around resolving technical problems and putting out fires. Lastly, smaller companies can give wider access to cloud applications to employees because they can use the cloud via their Blackberrys, iPad, iPhone or other device with access to the web. They don’t even need a PC.

Computing Costs

The Cloud holds advantages where the pocketbook is concerned, too. While costs for a dedicated server varies, depending on the apps hosted, a small business that needs to use a server for 700 to 800 hours a month could pay about $24.95 per month for shared hosting and between $90 and $140 for cloud computing, says the article. On the other hand, a dedicated server can cost $55 to $100 each month.

OK; so you may be asking, isn’t a dedicated server cheaper? Not really, because cloud computing usually comes with maintenance, free upgrades, and data encryption for security purposes. You’ll find cloud computing vendors that only charge pennies per hour in operating costs, while some will even offer free cloud computing services for limited daily use. For example, companies like Monitis, offer free monitoring tools, such as the ability to instantly check websites to see if they’re up or down.

Best of all, firms that prepay for cloud services often get the best prices. According to the article, experts estimate that a cloud computing data center is capable of operating 100 servers for just about $38,000 per year, only $5 per hour. And you can get even better rates when you contract with cloud vendors because they can predict profits for the year.

Tracking SLAs

While contracting with cloud vendors may get you better pricing, it’s not a guarantee of good service. That’s why it’s important to constantly track and monitor service level agreements (SLAs), and a good independent monitoring company can give you accurate numbers on such things as cloud performance metrics. Plus, monitoring services, such as Monitis, offer companies proactive notification if a server fails on your cloud platform.

Cloud computing makes good economic and business sense for small companies, and backing up those services with independent monitoring makes even more sense.

Many large and mid-size companies can save just as much or more with internal servers for their computing needs than they can with a cloud platform. That’s wisdom from Alan Ganek, chief technology officer and vice president of strategy and technology at IBM’s Software Group, in a recent article I read in PCWorld.

Meanwhile, enterprises with thousands of servers are more likely to maximize savings by building a private cloud or a hybrid public/private cloud. For example, cloud services offer such advantages as:

- a variable cost structure that eliminates the need for up-front capital expenses

- the ability to scale up or down the amount of servers required for an application.

Despite these general bits of wisdom, each company must decide which applications and workloads can be outsourced and which ones need to be kept in-house. It’s a highly personal decision, and firms need to take into account not only cost savings, but also risk factors and compliance requirements.

Overall, the most suitable outsourcing workloads for an external cloud are infrastructure workloads, including desktop and communications tools, said Ganek in the article. Meanwhile, database and application-oriented workloads are best suited for private clouds.

Ganek gave an example of how a company can break down what belongs where. He cited the example of IBM client Panasonic, which uses LotusLive, IBM’s hosted e-mail and collaboration service, rather than an in-house system.

“I’m sure that Panasonic has the scale to deploy private clouds, and I have every expectation that they will deploy private clouds for certain aspects of their business, but then you look at the specific challenge they faced with their collaboration tools — the fact that their 300,000 employees are scattered all over the world and the fact their starting place had many different regional implementations — using the IBM LotusLive cloud was very natural for them,” Ganek said.

I found this very revealing – especially taking a look at how one company decided what to keep inside and what to farm out. No matter what type of cloud your company builds or whether you opt to do your computing via internal servers that house apps, it’s essential that you set up some type of system of automated monitoring so that you keep computing running smoothly and be kept in the loop regarding potential problems.

San Jose, CA – May 6, 2010 – Monitis, the award-winning provider of the world’s first all-in-one Cloud-based systems-, network-, and application-monitoring suite, today announced that it has gone mobile via Monitis Mobile. With Monitis Mobile, IT managers around the world can access data from Monitis’ market-leading suite of tools via mobile devices, including iPhone, Android, Blackberry, and Symbian devices.

With Monitis Mobile IT managers and system administrators can access their Monitis data, take a snapshot of all recent checks, and see the details of each of the various monitoring tools within the Monitis suite. Most importantly, Monitis Mobile includes access to both internal and external monitoring tools, giving IT managers visibility over their page-load times from multiple geographically disperse locations, as well as over their internal server metrics such as CPU, memory, and more.

Said Founder and CEO, Hovhannes Avoyan, “Monitis has always been about and will always only ever be about saving the world’s IT managers massive amounts of time. With the launch of Monitis Mobile, which provides mobile access to both internal and external data, we are taking our game to a whole new level.”

Monitis Mobile is available as a free service within the Monitis suite of tools.

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. These accolades include:

• Being named as the “Most Innovative Start-Up for 2009″ by industry analyst The 451 Group at their annual client conference in December 2009. Monitis’ transformative ability to help companies reduce system downtime, improve IT staff productivity, while at the same time reducing operational expenditures were the core reasons for our being honored with this award.

• Being ranked among the 2010 OnDemand 100 in April 2010. The OnDemand 100 is a ranking by Morgan Stanley, KPMG, and AlwaysOn of 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.

Monitis were named as one of the 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.

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info@monitis.com

http://www.monitis.com

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