Monitis: Cloud Monitoring Blog

We at Monitis recently introduced a handy Android app that you can download for monitoring servers and networks. Perhaps you saw the news?

Well, because one of our most important customer bases is academia, I was recently reading about top IT trends that higher-ed IT pros are predicting for 2011, and lo and behold there was something about Android devices and tablet technologies (the iPad) and how important they are for the new generation of students who rely on mobile devices in the classroom (no more notebooks…I mean the old-fashioned kind you write in with a pen!).

Rasmussen Has Big IT Development Plans for 2011

In the article, Hap Aziz, director for the school of technology and design at Rasmussen College in Wisconsin, said he plans this year to integrate more tablet technologies into his school’s classrooms in 2011. Aside from the iPad, Aziz sees the new slew of Android tablets as potential tools for students and educators.

“These Android devices are still somewhat pricey,” said Aziz, in the article, “but definitely show the democratization of technology (beyond just Apple products) and prove how portable and accessible innovation is becoming for college students.”

And on the Cloud front, the school will implement virtual labs and other Web-based classroom support tools.  For example, it is looking to digitize its library, and give students remote access to the data. Aziz acknowledged that many universities revere traditional libraries, but he noted that non-traditional students need state-of-the-art resources that go beyond the “traditional four walls and a roof.”

The IT initiatives will help the  school save money, and also give students a “consistent view of the curriculum matter and materials across the board,” said Aziz, and provide for simpler classroom management. “This consistency would be [impossible] to achieve in the traditional classroom environment, where students are geographically dispersed and working on different pieces of equipment with multiple software versions.”

Boy, campus life sure is different than when I went to school. I’m glad today’s generation is getting the full benefit of remote access to technology, and at the same time, enjoy the comfort and security of affordable server, network, cloud platform and other types of monitoring.

Webmasters Can Check Server Speed Instantly with New Page Load-Tester

SAN JOSÉ, CA., February 10, 2011 – Yes, the best things in life are free! That’s why Monitis, the award-winning provider of the world’s first all-in-one monitoring cloudware, has added a no-cost instant, full web page load-testing tool http://pageload.monitis.com.

“We have a single vision in mind for our new and free instant, web page load-testing service, and that is to help Sysadmins, Webmasters and developers save time by quickly finding out about issues or problems on their sites and then fixing them immediately,” said Monitis Founder and CEO Hovhannes Avoyan. “In the end, saving time allows Sysadmins to better manage their online businesses and raise customer service levels.”

The new Monitis tool loads for speed testing a complete HTML page, including all objects such as images, Javascripts, CSS, Flash, RSS feeds, frames, and iframes and then reports back with easy-to-read bar graphs on the load time of each object(see below).

The testing service mimics the way a web page is loaded in a real web browser. Users need only enter a URL of a page to test the load time of all elements on that page. The test will help to find page or server problems and load-related bottlenecks. Test results enable IT pros to quickly identify and fix issues such as slow load time or failure to load of some images or CSS files from web servers. Importantly, Monitis can check the page load speed simultaneously from multiple testing locations across the U.S., Europe and Asia, giving Sysadmins a complete report of real user experiences in different markets.

“Our new web page tester performs a one-time check without any need to register or sign up as a customer, although Webmasters and Sysadmins who want to perform server tests regularly throughout the day, say every 15 minutes or so, and get alerts in case of failures, can sign up for Monitis, our premium service,” said Avoyan. “This easy-to-use instant tool broadens our menu of instant-check tools, such as instant remote ping and instant http check. What they all have in common is that they make life much easier for IT pros, saving them time.”

Monitis is committed to continue providing free tools to small businesses and entrepreneurs. Monitis recently fully redesigned its free Mon.itor.Us monitoring service (http://mon.itor.us), enabling comprehensive server and network monitoring services at no cost. Monitis is planning new tools for Sysadmins throughout all 2011.

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 that is based 100% in the Cloud. Besides Monitis’s enthusiastic and loyal user base of 60,000 customers from small businesses to Fortune 500 companies to government agencies and educational institutions, Monitis has won rave reviews from the technology analyst community, such as ”Most Innovative Start-Up″ from The 451 Group and a listing in OnDemand 100, a ranking by Morgan Stanley, KPMG, and AlwaysOn, of 100 top private companies globally.

Monitis was founded in 2005 by a team of seasoned IT developers fed-up and tired of the limits of software-based tools, while inspired by the promise of the Cloud. Headquartered in San Jose, CA, Monitis’s team of IT professionals has extensive experience running enterprise-grade IT businesses, as well as starting and selling several IT start-ups. Monitis employs a global workforce and enjoys a robust average month-on-month revenue growth of over 10%.

For more information, contact:

Monitis Inc.

Sales & Marketing Department

sales@monitis.com

http://www.monitis.com

US & Canada Toll Free: +1-800-657-7949

OK; there’s some real innovative thinking going on in Arizona – and I’m not talking about immigration reform.

A while ago, I posted about Arizona University moving its internal e-mail program to Microsoft’s Business Online Productivity Online Suite. About 18,000 staff members will migrate and benefit from a larger inbox than they currently have, instant messaging and tools to set up online, collaborative meetings.

Now it seems that Northern Arizona University, located in Flagstaff, is making its move to the cloud by adopting standardizing its project portfolio management (PPM) on TeamDynamixHE, a Web-based service that will give the university’s IT team a centralized system to manage project requests, prioritize and score potential projects, and streamline the project startup and staffing process.

Manually, those are very time intensive tasks, although the school was already using automation internally – a combination of Microsoft Project with SharePoint. 

Read on; the way the school wants to use this sounds fascinating:

First, the school will use the system to track a paperless project and an e-planning initiative. The second part of the school’s planned usage allows students to select what programs they want to follow. That then produces a list of courses that are available. And based on the students’ selections, Northern Arizona can then determine how many courses, classrooms, and teachers will be needed to meet student demand.

It seems like the school got along okay with its legacy system, but it needed to convert to a centralized format in order to set itself up for growth for the future. Plus, it wanted to be able to track project costs and resource usage to predict the total, true costs of a project – including the management part.

I think this is a really innovative use of cloud technology to help a school get greater control over its costs. And I’m hoping that the decision-makers there are considering regular monitoring of the app to ensure that it’s running smoothly and that staff has access to it when they want it.

Good luck, Northern Arizona U!

2020. I’ll have slowed down a bit physically, and hopefully I’ll be a bit wiser about life, but by then, one thing’s for sure – accessing software via cloud computing, versus the desktop, will be the standard.

This is the finding of a new survey by the Pew Research Center. The organization asked IT pros and other stakeholders around the world questions about technology, and the vast majority of respondents, nearly three-quarters, said that by 2010, most people will not use software on a general-purpose PC to do their work. Instead, they predict that application developers will develop for smart phones and other companies that provide Internet-based applications, rather than PC operating systems.

But just as we’re seeing today, 2020′s computing infrastructure will include a mix of private clouds, public clouds and internal servers.

Despite the sunny outlook, the availability of broadband, the ability of diverse systems to work together, security, privacy and quality of service were all issues that those polled cited. Others polled worried that vesting the majority of their data in a few large companies that constitute most of the cloud, such as Google, would limit the openness, innovation and creativity of the Internet.

Ten years from now, I have no doubt that doing business on the cloud will be more common than it is today – and that it’ll even be preferable (even in a hybrid environment). But what I’m even more sure of is how the need for monitoring of cloud-based apps and services will continue and grow. As more companies put their faith in cloud providers, they’ll also recognize the need to make sure those providers deliver.

I read about the new Harvey Nash CIO Survey 2010 in which there were some stark differences in the findings for European and American CIOs. One big dividing line was that even though U.S. CIOs are paid a lot more and have more responsibility, they are less satisfied with their jobs than the CIOs across the Atlantic. German and Scandinavian CIOs scored much higher on job satisfaction.

Before I even got into the article, which was an interview with Harvey Nash, the survey project leader, I knew the explanation behind that finding: 2009 was a rough year, and American CIOs had their budgets cut – yet were asked to do a lot more. Who could blame them for being dissatisfied?

But what struck me most of all about the survey results was that European CIOs were less likely to use SaaS and cloud services than their Yankee cousins. I say it struck me because the Europeans, on many fronts, often embrace technology faster than Americans and deploy it for the public good, for example, hi-speed trains and smart credit cards.

According to Nash, one explanation is that folks who were experimenting with this model aren’t shifting their entire infrastructures to the cloud. U.S. CIOs, although nervous about the Cloud in the beginning, have come to accept it. “We spoke to more small and mid-cap CIOs in the U.S., and many of them were more open to it than the larger companies,” Nash said.

That could have a lot to do with the U.S. emerging from the recession faster than, say, the U.K. and continental Europe. In his survey, Nash asked companies, “How are you approaching the new year?” and found that “the further you went across Europe to the East, the less likely the CIOs were to be using SaaS. But having said that, I don’t think it means they are not doing it, they are just doing it at a more cautious rate.”

Although I have no doubt German, French and English IT executives will eventually embrace the Cloud on a more robust level, I think Euro CIOs are plenty concerned about cloud security, just as their American counterparts were and continue to be.

One way to deal with those concerns is to approach the Cloud in stages – leave sensitive data and super-important apps on your internal server. Another way is to use SaaS (I know, I know, if you Europeans aren’t ready for SaaS, that’s OK.) and cloud-based monitoring solutions to make sure your data is safe and apps are running smoothly.

There are always options!

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.