Monitis: Cloud Monitoring Blog

As we start the New Year, I want to take a quick look back to review some of the incredible milestones we’ve witnessed and orchestrated here at Monitis. We’ve watched the cloud industry expand and grow – with new cloud providers launching their platforms and a variety of new service providers bringing their brands and tools to the cloud.

Last year was an incredibly successful year for Monitis, as more and more companies making the move to the cloud relied upon our monitoring services (such as external monitoring, back-end monitoring, web traffic monitoring, transaction monitoring and EC2/S3 cloud monitoring.

We grew our customer base by 400% and our revenue by 500% last year. As you might guess, I’m ecstatic about those numbers, not just because it means we’re doing better, but because it represents growth for the whole industry, too. And I think it proves growing recognition by companies that accessing services, information and apps via the cloud – but safely – is the future of IT.

One of our biggest thrills this past year happened in November, at The 451 Group’s 4th Annual Client Conference in Boston. We competed with a group of other technology companies in the event’s “Innovators Showcase,” and we gave a presentation called “Monitoring in the Cloud: Monitor Anything from Anywhere.” We won! and we were named “Most Innovative Start-Up of 2009.”

2009 was also a year of continuous enhancements and innovations to our services. I’ll list them below, and as you read through these developments and click on the links to learn more detail, you’ll be able to chart just how far we’ve come in delivering state-of-the-art, cloud-based network and systems monitoring .

I’m very proud, and I’m grateful beyond words to you, our customers. I sincerely hope you’ll help us usher in a new year of enhancements and services that, I am certain, will help you grow and expand your own businesses. We’ve got some exciting things planned!

Our 2009 Milestones:

- Launch of ‘Top 10′ service – providing network and systems engineers with a holistic view of processes and applications that are consuming the most resources, enabling them to quickly diagnose or prevent problems and properly match IT infrastructure capacity to business needs.

- Launch of asset management as a service, which automatically creates inventory of software, logs usage patterns and proactively suggests optimization to help companies reduce IT cost.

- Announcement of remote monitoring of system events.

- Launch of performance testing as a service, enabling companies to instantly run site performance tests, as well as keep historical records and manage performance scripts.

- Launch of public reporting and widgets, features that enabled our customers to make their websites’ uptime statistics publicly available – for the benefit of their own customers.

- Launch of our cloud monitoring service

- The addition of a monitoring location in China – expanding our global coverage

- The addition of a new external monitoring location within Amazon EC2 cloud network, allowing customers of the cloud provider to check their users’ web experience locally.

- Tweet alerts for network failures on Twitter

- Management Information Base (MIB) browsing for MonitorSNMP. A MIB is a type of database used to manage the devices in a communications network and comprises a collection of objects in a virtual database used to manage a network’s routers and switches.

- Introduction of remote monitoring to work on the Sun’s Solaris platform

- A free links checker service to detect broken and dead-end website links and alert users

- An interface for command-line tools to help make IT folks more productive and efficient

- A web ecosystem visualization service called WebMap, which helps IT engineers and managers understand their networks better in terms of status, health and manageability.

- Monitis S3 Monitoring, an on-demand cloud storage and usage service, enabling customers to independently monitor Amazon S3, notifying them when they reach prescribed thresholds.

- Database performance management and load testing from the cloud.

- User-friendly enhancements, such as the ability to manage all external monitors from a single, central location, enabling 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.

- A new scheduling feature for our on-demand load testing

- Special holiday pricing for e-commerce monitoring – to help prevent site downtime

- MonitorSNMP, an enterprise-grade SNMP network monitoring service available via the cloud

- A time-saving universal cloud monitoring framework that enables external and internal monitoring from all cloud-hosting providers including Rackspace Cloud, Amazon Web Services and GoGrid.

- The ability for customers to create custom, end-to-end locations for server monitoring locations

- A free service to instantly check website response times from different locations

- Enterprise-class options for system failure and performance outage notification management

The new year has brought out some cool predictions on the direction of cloud computing, and there’s plenty more where that came from. A new cloud-related trend (this one on the consumer side) that I read about on the horizon is the growth of services that stream movies, TV shows, music, video games, newspapers, magazines and books on demand from the cloud to a Web-connected portable or home computing device.

That would mean the end of physical content downloaded off the Internet.

If you think this is mere cloud conjecture and more hype, consider Comcast’s recent beta launch of Fancast Xfinity – a cost-free bonus for its cable/Internet customers that streams shows from partners like HBO and Cinemax, TBS and TNT to up to three of a customer’s computers, regardless of the physical location of the computers.

And remember Apple’s recent purchase of streaming music company LaLa Media? The strategy behind Apple’s move there is to create an alternative to its file-download process – which is time consuming and confines sales to its own customer base. The LaLa acquisition will enable Apple to sell virtual copies of songs or an album via instant stream, on-demand to your chosen device – be a mobile phone, MAC or PC. Another project in the making: a streaming subscription video service over the Web to devices such as the Apple TV set-top box, challenging the cable and satellite TV industries. CBS and Disney have reportedly expressed interest, according to a recent article I read.

Among other trends in development of cloud-based consumer devices:

A new generation of tablet-like smartbook computers that are bigger than a smart phone but thinner and lighter than a netbook portable PC. Look out for them this year, say Apple insiders, notes the story. Because these tablet smartbooks won’t feature a hard drive, they’ll be energy efficient and rely on Wi-Fi or mobile phone connectivity to retrieve and store content from the cloud. The smartbooks could also be used for Internet phone and video calling.

While consumer use of the cloud is a bit off-topic for this blog, there are parallels in the business world – such as more companies putting their apps on the cloud versus keeping them on expensive and high-maintenance servers.

Whether you’re a consumer or a business, changes are coming. For consumers, the days of buying songs to store on your computer may be a coming to an end. And for businesses, the days of keeping files or apps on an internal server are ebbing.

One of the ‘hype’ messages about the Cloud is that it is green – meaning environmentally friendlier than companies running vast resource-wasting machines that need constant energy for maintenance. Well, is this merely hype, or is there any truth to the claim.

Cnet news raises the question, too, and quotes a great blog post on the subject that brings up some realistic points about the Cloud’s level of greenness. First, the problem is that is difficult to measure cloud greenness with the information that’s out there because none of the major cloud companies are providing utilization data.

I especially like this quote: “We now have the ability to run our applications on thousands of servers, but previously this wasn’t even possible. To say it another way, we can potentially use several years worth of energy in literary a few hours, where previously this wasn’t even an option.”

So, wait. Doesn’t that make Cloud computing more of an energy gobbler than companies’ current IT methods? The author says: “…hypothetically we’re using more resources, not less.”

But conversely, if companies possessed those thousand servers and ran them (underutilized), the power usage per utilized server would be significantly higher. The author adds: “But then again, buying those servers would have been out reach for most, so it’s not a fair comparison. There we are–back, at where we started. You may use 80 percent less energy per unit, but have 1,000 percent more capacity, which at the end of the day means you’re using more, not less energy.”

You might look at this issue with the U.S. Interstate Highway system in mind. Eisenhower kicked off the project in the 50s, and the development of super-highways cutting across underdeveloped lands opened those places to development – and more consumption of resources.

Another cloud blogger quoted in the cnet piece added: “…Cloud computing is all about providing standard components as services (it’s pure volume operations). The problem of course is that we will end up consuming more of these standard components because it’s so easy to do so (i.e. in old speak, there is less yak shaving) and it becomes easier to build new and more exciting services on these (standing on the shoulders of giants). ”

Certainly, there are plenty of stories out there about how governments and companies are saving and being more efficient by running apps and data centers on the cloud. But that’s not the same as green computing, is it?

But I hold out my judgment on the greenness of cloud computing until we as an industry come up with an efficient, standardized way of measuring it.

Virtual desktops – the combination of virtual access, application virtualization and virtual machine software – aren’t new, but why aren’t they in more widespread use? a recent article that I read asks.

After all, desktop virtualization offers IT folks help managing desktop systems – from dealing with both operating system and application updates to unexpected failures to security for mobile systems.

On this blog, I even wrote about the birth of a new cloud-based “D” or desktop by Sun Microsystems.

But blockages to adoption by enterprises may include the following:

- Psychological: Don’t mess with it if it “ain’t” broke, and leave well enough alone.

- In today’s world, running apps and OSs directly on physical, internal servers works – although it certainly isn’t efficient, and it’s costly. So, even though it’s not the perfect solution, lots of IT managers are afraid to change it to something they feel adds risk. Besides, most desktop virtualization approaches require changes to operation of desktop systems, applications and the like. It’s extra – and many might say unnecessary – work!

- Service issues: Even though the performance issues of virtual desktops are decreasing as time goes by, support issues are a reality – although increasingly minor on a person-to-person level. But large organizations can count up support instances and consider service a larger factor.

- Aversion to being “lassoed and dragged.” I love that quote, and bravo to the author of the piece for his creative way of describing how users of desktops issued by their company are averse to the move to virtualization because they’ve customized their systems with Twitter and the like, and they don’t want to lose that. Unfortunately, rather than deal with a whole lot of one-off conversions, IT often lassoes and drags desktop users in a standardize fashion. “People don’t like to be lassoed and dragged,” he says.

What I really connected with in this article is the last point: that the development of the cloud and the trend toward “cloud-based personal productivity applications” such as email and document and calendar management might change minds about moving to virtual environments.

I’d like to add the economic factor here, too. Yes, it’s tough to change human nature, but at some point, many companies, large and small, will be convinced of the savings and efficiencies of going virtual – in part due to the cloud – and that will add fuel to the fire of change. And once companies begin to feel comfortable with the reliability of virtualization and the cloud and cloud services (such as transaction monitoring), there will be more migration.

With IT – just like other corporate departments – under the gun from senior management to centralize and reap economies of scale, distributed systems seem the dream answer to cost-cutting directives from above. To be sum it all up, distributed systems offer an attractive solution – centralized control along with dispersed physical assets and overhead.

In a recent article I read, the author put it just right: “The relentlessly increasing cost and complexity of maintaining IT departments and infrastructure makes on-tap computing power very attractive to modern enterprises.”

But beyond this simple cost-efficiency based explanation of the benefits of cloud computing for businesses, here are five reasons to make the switch:

- Scalability: PaaS is the end goal of businesses moving to the cloud. It’s the idea that a platform – hosting SaaS apps, can itself be run as a service. Consumers already use the cloud in a SaaS environment. SaaS applications running on a PaaS are easy to deploy, just the opposite of the complex and difficult environment at most companies today – where companies exhaust resources and manpower deploying, maintaining, and upgrading software systems “using skills way outside their businesses’ core function of interest simply because the resulting application is indispensable,” says the story. How true! Over a grid, the power of existing systems can be scaled exponentially, maintained seamlessly, upgraded transparently, and redeployed at will.

- Speed: Grid-powered PaaS and their apps can help increase productivity and a business’s competitiveness with fast deployment of new systems or the speedy ramping up existing ones. In addition, users can tap SaaS apps the run on grid-based PaaSs from anywhere globally…fast and without any special training.

- Deployment: Developers can pare weeks off integration and configuration time with hosting environments for their cloud platforms. On-demand network computing power and storage capability means that companies don’t have to invest the bank and everything under the mattress in static hardware.

- Cost: As I said above, this is one of the biggest advantages for companies making the move to the cloud. Why? “Grids pull across projects to provide more predictability at less cost with fewer software licenses, ” says the story. On top of that, PaaS, combined with SaaS, allows businesses to pay only for the resources they actually use. And don’t’ forget about the savings from not investing in expensive hardware!

PaaS, distributed computing infrastructure and virtualization are working together to create powerful and fast networks. It’s the imaginative and powerful apps, managed services, such as network, server and transaction monitoring, and end-user apps that will complete the picture to bring about a true cloud revolution.

It’s becoming more and more apparent daily that Microsoft is betting heavily on the future of cloud computing.

The big cloud-based news that came out of Microsoft was back in the fall, when it launched Azure, the lynchpin of its cloud-computing strategy.

But now, The Wall Street Journal reports that Microsoft is creating a new unit, called the Server and Cloud division by merging two existing sub-units within its broader server and tools business: “the Windows Azure group, which has driven the launch of its cloud-computing program, and the Windows Server and Solutions Group.”

According to the story, the new division will be headed by Amitabh Srivastava, who reports to Server and Solutions Group head Bob Muglia.

Microsoft made the announcement on its internal blog.

Tivoli Live Monitoring Services – that’s the name of IBM’s new cloud-based monitoring suite for data centers that it has built for IT administrators. IBM’s aim is to give IT folks a central point of control to monitor network activity and help prevent outages, which is not healthy for data centers – as we know.

IBM’s new product gives businesses a snapshot view of all their different operating systems, virtualized servers, middleware and software and software applications.

“With digital information as the lifeblood of more organizations, even the smallest companies or divisions consider the datacenter’s functionality mission-critical,” Al Zollar, general manager of IBM Tivoli, said in a statement from the company.

According to a press report that I read about the new product, the new monitoring service will help “quickly identify and address potential outages and bottlenecks that threaten application availability before impacting end-users.” Tivoli, available on IBM’s cloud, also alerts IT operations when the service detects a potential problem and it gives dashboard data to help administrators analyze and correct the issue.

Even though Big Blue is a late-comer in SaaS launchings, versus companies like Google (with its Apps and Docs), Tivoli represents the latest in a general ramping up of SaaS offerings by the company. Recently, IBM issued another cloud-based product (Blue Insight) that lets users analyze and distribute business intelligence and analytics applications.

Of course, there are already many great monitoring solutions out there that are providing businesses that move apps and databases to the cloud with an extra measure of comfort and reliability. Here at Monitis, we’re seeing incredible demand from website owners and businesses that need stable, 24/7 monitoring of everything from transactions to servers and networks, even printers – and from the cloud.

Who knows, perhaps Big Blue even took a look at us (and companies like us), and spying our growing success, decided that this was a game they needed to be part of?

There’s a great, although somewhat scientifically-centric story on the future of cloud computing that’s worth reading.

Essentially, the story asks: “Is cloud computing a useful computational platform for the computational problems you and your institution need to address?”  In other words, why is computing on the cloud better than maintaining internal servers, hardware and all the resources needed to support them?

Right off the bat, the story points out a great reason: “Through the use of pre-configured virtual machines, scientists avoid any of the technical issues associated with getting an application to run — they just use it.”

But a good point to consider is that, since cloud computing is on the Web, the first and most obvious question to ask is whether the Internet connection used by your cloud computing service provides enough bandwidth to handle your app demands. And does it add too much latency? This author says that the cloud was designed as a “latency-tolerant network,” and may not be suitable for certain users – such as scientific and HPC computing. Interestingly, he points out that “many HPC algorithms and applications… bottleneck and die” even after just a few microseconds.

But for many other types of users, enterprises from large corporations to small and mid-sized web-based businesses, cloud providers offer plenty of bandwidth – even considering the presence of virtual machines. VMs can add to latency issues because of the time-sharing nature of their underlying hardware. This is so even though users may never have a clue of a VM failure running in a cloud environment. Some cloud computing providers take snapshots of the VMS as they run jobs, and if the hardware fails for one VM, then all can be restarted from that snapshot.

But while the author of this article may have mixed feelings about the cloud for the scientific community, he underscores, however, that “one strong appeal of cloud computing” is the simplicity of contracting with an Internet provider to access a lot of free-floating computational resources. It’s an “astounding bang for the buck” platform that needs very little capital expenditure, he notes.

Further he gives a boost to the Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2) as one example of a cloud computing service that is available to the scientific community, as users can specify VMS that can run on unused hardware resources within their datacenters as those resources become available. This way, scientists only pay for those resources they actually use.

That’s a key benefit of the cloud for all users – not just scientists, I might add.

In the end, after an analysis of the cloud for scientific computing, he adds: “The future looks bright, although there are some big clouds out there! Happy “cloud” computing.”

I, as the owner of a cloud-computing service provider who takes great care to provide proper bandwidth, security, cost-savings and other benefits to my customers, couldn’t agree more.

Oh, no, say it isn’t so.

I read where users of the fast-selling Windows 7 are resorting to re-installing the software – which facilitates different aspects of cloud computing – because they’re seeing a totally black screen after logging on to the system.

It’s being called the “black screen of death,” and it’s not the kind of dark stain that Windows needs now, especially as it paves the road to cloud computing with Azure.

According to a news story I read on the “black screen of death,” Microsoft said it was checking out whether its latest security update, issued on November 10th, caused the problem.

I heard that the flaw also affects Vista, XP and other operating systems, and that millions of people may have been affected.

The “black screen of death” moniker is a play on the “blue screen of death,” which appears when Microsoft operating systems crash.

As of this posting, no fix has been issued by Microsoft.

A new report released on November 20^th by the European Network and Information Security Agency (ENISA) outlines the benefits and potential pitfalls of cloud computing. The 123-page report, “Cloud Computing: Benefits, Risks and Recommendations for Information Security,” offers recommendations to businesses on how to minimize the security risks of trusing their data to a cloud provider.

This report seems right on time, as more companies turn to the cloud to do business, drawn by lower maintenance and costs. Analysts IDC expects worldwide spending on cloud services to hit $17.4 billion, climbing to $44.2 billion by 2013.

The ENISA report spells out the risks of, well, risk, on cloud computing. While cloud-service providers offer 24/7 availability, data centers can go down. And customers relinquish security – which they previously handled on their own – to providers.

It also discusses the dangers of customers becoming dependent on a single provider, facing challenges if they want to move data and apps to a different provider. Further, companies could face risks from regulatory audits on the data they keep on the cloud, the report said. And, because we all know that tasks lists tend to be bigger than what we actually get done, some cloud providers may not fully or properly delete data when a customer requests it.

In its report, ENISA outlines measures that companies can take to safeguard their security when dealing with cloud-service providers.

It recommends that firms perform risk assessments, essentially comparing the potential risks of storing data in the cloud against keeping files in an internal data center. It’s a good idea to also compare different cloud providers to narrow the list and then obtain service-level assurances from selected providers. It says, too, that customers should clearly specify which services and tasks are to be handled by internal IT and which by its cloud provider.

I recommend, too, that companies making the leap to the cloud employ 24/7
website and server monitoring services that can warn customers if cyber crooks are attempting unauthorized access to data or trying to breach firewalls.

ENISA even provides a checklist and detailed questions that customers can use when shopping for a cloud provider.

This is a great read; I encourage you to take a look at the full report on cloud security.