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…

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How to become a SaaS provider?

Guest Article by Iliya Gladkov

Lately we are witnessing in the global market a lot of SaaS (Software as a Service) projects, most of them are offered through the service of the company which is also the creator of the system. Other service providers (specializing in hosting), would be happy to use someone else's SaaS system, but are very often faced with well-designed commercial development products and open-source options which are not suitable solutions for several reasons.

I want to talk about easy and economical way for hosting companies to become an independent SaaS provider.

Competition among hosting providers have long led to a situation where virtually all of their services are of the lowest level. As a result, they have to actively seek for solutions in the form of running the most profitable service or join the trend of virtualization and cloud systems.

In my opinion, virtualization for the hosting providers is more or less clear (large-scale cutting of low cost and trimmed VPS resource), the clouds for the most part seemed to be only publicity (expensive and difficult, especially for the corporate sector), but with the launch of high-margin services, it can surely lead to success.

What remains now is to find good projects that can be effortless, secure and easy to use. It is important to remove all support from the providers as much as possible and transfer this responsibility to the developer of the system. This requirement is quite extraordinary, but it is achievable.

Our company has released a special tool, the TeamWox SaaS Agent, which is a control panel to manage multiple versions of SaaS collaboration TeamWox, and the best of all - its free!

What is special about TeamWox SaaS is that it allows one server to hold multiple copies of SaaS without the need to allocate VPS hosting for each individual copy.

This is a very cost-effective solution for providers of SaaS or Cloud services. It is enough to have one dedicated server with Windows 2003/2008/Vista/7, a static IP address, a wildcard SSL certificate (for example, *. tmxsaas.com) and automatically controlled DNS server (for example, Simple DNS Plus).

Installing the agent is very simple - download, install and connect a Default Account. The agent will automatically install the necessary updates and the TeamWox system installer (35 Mb). After a simple setup of IP addresses, SSL certificate and DNS, then you are ready to launch SaaS and distribute the copies.

The creation of a new copy of TeamWox SaaS takes maximum time of 2 minutes including the filling of the registration form of licenses. Moreover, all licenses up to 10 users are granted for free for an unlimited time, and the free trial version period for an unlimited number of users is issued for 2 months.

TeamWox SaaS Agent

The SaaS provider will have nothing to worry about, other than just run the service with a free 10 user licenses and two-month trial, in an attempt to comprehend whether the system is suitable for them. If you agree, you can easily become a partner of our company MetaQuotes Software Corp., gain full access to our marketing materials and full technical support from our specialists.

Since it is impossible to share all the information on this post, below you can find some links to explain our proposition in more detail:

• How does TeamWox SaaS Agent work
• How to become a SaaS provider
• The financial calculations of income for SaaS provider

I would be happy to answer any questions!

This Guest Post was contributed by Iliya Gladkov on behalf of MetaQuotes Software Corp (metaquotes.net). For Guest Post at Techno-Pulse Check: Guest Blogging Guidelines

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