Monitis Review: Cloud Based Monitoring

Summary

Monitis	All in One monitoring from the Cloud
A Service from	Monitis (USA)
Useful for	Monitoring Websites, Servers, Networks, Cloud (Public, Private)
User Interface	Slick, Intuitive & Interactive Charts & Graphical representations
Technology	Ajax, JavaScript, HTML5
USP	Cloud Based SaaS model
Limitation	Check Detailed Review
Customer Care	Prompt & meaningful response (I used live support)
Conclusion	Recommended

Detailed Review

On October 4th, 2010; I signed-up for a free trial of Monitis. I am monitoring 2 websites/blogs using Monitis. You can monitor any or all of the following:

• External Monitor (HTTP, FTP, e-mail, VoIP, MySQL, Ping, TCP, UDP, Web Page Content)
• Traffic Monitor (Visitor Tracking)
• Full Page Load Monitor (Analyze the load time of every element on your web page)
• Internal Monitor (CPU, memory, storage, configuration, events, processes, internal ping, SNMP Object New!)
• Cloud Monitor (instance start, stop, external and internal monitoring rules, notifications)
  • Amazon
  • Rackspace
  • GoGrid
• Transaction (multi-step applications) Monitor 
• Log Parser

Currently I am using Monitis Cloud based All in One Monitoring for the following three categories:

• External Monitor (HTTP, FTP, e-mail, VoIP, MySQL, Ping, TCP, UDP, Web Page Content)
• Traffic Monitor.
• Full Page Load Monitor (Analyze the load time of every element on your web page)

For external Monitoring I used my blog and another web based application. You can add different Monitors to your Welcome Window.

External Monitoring:

• Website Uptime
• Average Response Time
• Location wise chart & availability
• Date-wise or last 7 days etc.

Visitor Tracking

• Visits
• Total Page Views
• Average Page Views Per Visit
• Hourly basis visitor tracking

The results were presented in an user friendly manner. The user interface is quite intuitive. You’ve the options of tabular data, Pie chart, Bar chart, Line chart etc. Check the following screen shot. The 1st chart shows A bar & line chart of Visitors on an hourly basis. 2nd graph shows a bar chart website availability & Response time. 3rd graph shows a line chart for my blog’s uptime & availability from different locations of the world.

Full Page Load Monitor

It shows no data to display. I am wondering why? Yet to contact their tech-support on this issue. I’ll update you later about it.

Benchmark

I compared the visitor’s tracking of my blog, reported by Monitis to Google Analytics. On a daily basis, visitors count reported by Monitis were quite close to Google Analytics count. Check the stats of this blog (techno-pulse.com) for October 7, 2010:

	Monitis	Google Analytics
Visits	230	236
Page Views	332	360

Noteworthy features 

• SMS notification (Real-time notification incase any of your service fails)
  • I did get the activation SMS but didn’t receive any alerts there after.
• e-Mail Notification
  • It’s on a regular basis in a presentable format
• Scheduled Maintenance of your server can be configured (if you’ve prior notice)
• Notification Rules
• Actionable Reports
  • Configure & get your own reports
• Export to PDF/CSV
  • Quite handy when you want to print Reports
• Ajax pop-ups (reduces the load time)
  • Makes it highly interactive & user friendly
• Share
  • Click & Share reports by e-Mail.
• Live Support
  • 24/7 & most of the times I found them prompt. But on a few occasions it seems no one was available for chat.
• The following screen shot of a Web Map shows a summary of Response time from different locations. The RED arrow signifies an issue in accessing the website/blog at that location.

Limitations

 

As of now I can find only one:

I wanted to add India as a new location to my external monitor (i.e. Location based monitoring of my blog). I got in touch with the tech-support & the executive suggested me to download an agent (a Setup file). As Monitis calls it self a 100% Cloud based  SaaS - I am still wondering why should I download & run a setup at my desktop to add a new external location to my monitor?

Isn’t a true SaaS configurable from the browser?

As SaaS is still evolving & so is Monitis, I would like to hear my readers views.

Conclusion

Recommended.  I am trying other Monitis monitors as well. Stay tuned to read more about their other offerings in coming days…

Cloud Computing Articles at Techno-Pulse

• Best & Free Cloud Computing Applications
• India Based Cloud Computing Service Providers
• Cloud Based Project Management – DeskAway SaaS
• Develop SaaS on OrangeScape PaaS to Run on any Cloud Infrastructure
• Cloud Computing Service: A Basic Introduction – 1
• Cloud Computing: A Basic Introduction – 2
• Cloud Computing Platform Introduction - PaaS
• Cloud based on-Demand SaaS CRM for India: Impel
• Develop Cloud based SaaS Applications on Wolf Platform
• SaaS Introduction with Example – Cloud Service
• Sync.in Review - Real-time Collaboration in Cloud