5K Mon.itor.Us Agent Downloads

Mon.itor.Us announces 5,000 downloads of its Windows Smart Agent. The agent monitors hardware resource utilization per service and per process on Windows machines and notifies about abnormalities detected. Smart Agent also allows to use any of the customer machines for local monitoring. It is useful particularly for intranet applications and networks monitoring.

The agent based service is one of key differentiators for Mon.itor.Us. In contrast to other web uptime monitoring service, Mon.itor.Us not only provide external both also internal systems monitoring service, delivering one-stop solutions for webmasters and website owners. When it launched in March 2007 skeptics were predicting very limited usage of this feature because of security concerns. The facts although talk differently and 5k downloads proves that users really like this easy to use hosted service.

Mon.itor.Us premium service Monitis provides more advanced agent both for Windows and Linux machines.

One more usage scenario for Monitis internal monitor: how to check office/home connectivity

Although Internal Monitis monitoring was primarily designed to check Intranet applications and server resource utilization, it could also be used to check overall office connectivity. After being installed on a computer within the office network, a ping/http check can be added with an external URL e.g. www.google.com. The widget view will then show latency of connection in real time.

Web Performance Monitoring Metrics

We previously discussed 5 different types of web monitoring. Here is the list of important metrics that each of these services can provide for holistic web performance management.

Visitors Tracking

• Pages views
• Unique visitors
• New visitors
• Returned visitors
• Visitors distribution by countries and cities
• Browser statistics
• Max traffic
• OS statistics
• Referrers
• Entry pages
• Exit pages
• Time spent
• Conversion rate
• Most popular pages
• Common paths
• Search keywords

External Monitoring

• Response time from different external locations
• Uptime daily/monthly
• Average response time all location per URL
• MTTF (mean time to failure)
• MTTR (mean time to repair)
• Aggregated Uptime
• Incidents after working hours
• Average response time all web services
• Planned downtime
• Failures and notification

Internal Monitoring

• Server resource utilization (CPU, Memory, Network, HDD, Virtual Memory, Threads, Process)
• Total free disk space
• Number of alerts on exceeding system capacity thresholds
• Process resource utilization
• Response time local
• Process uptime
• Server uptime
• Uptime local

Online reputation Monitoring

• backlinks per SE
• indexes per SE
• position per keyword per SE
• social bookmarks
• references in blogs
• references in news
• page ranks

Transaction (application) Monitoring

• Failed transactions
• Coverage
• Total execution time
• Execution time per each step
• SLA figures (uptime)
• Page load breakdown
• Average execution per step

How Web Developers Can Keep Customers Happy

Website designers and web application developers provide support for the sites they developed. Most of the companies are small and don't have large marketing budgets, so they relies on word of mouth generated by happy customers. Developers typically either host or have VPN access to customer sites and when customer experience problem with the site they call web developer and get problem fixed. And customer satisfaction very much depends on their website uptime and service level provided by the web developer.

There is way for developers to improve customer satisfaction. Using Monitis internal monitoring, web developers can setup monitoring agent and perform customer server monitoring right from their location. By checking all the nodes between end user and server they got complete and exact picture and early notification about current or upcoming problem.

Combined with external monitoring, internal monitoring may provide more proactive way to handle problems. Even if it is intranet application, developers can use VPN connection for monitoring the application. When customer calls developer he will be please to hear “yes, we know the problem and already working on it.” Or developers may call their client and say "we notice an issue on your server and will fix it now." Moreover, by monitoring nodes, developers may quickly identify problem and fix it, thus increasing their productivity and reducing mean time-to -repair (MTTR).

5 Monitors for Ultimate Business Performance: Part 2 Internal Monitor

2. Internal (a.k.a. Resource, Capacity Utilization, Server, Systems Health) Monitoring – continuously checks utilization of system resources. Small footprint agents need to be installed on client servers and desktops, which collect the CPU, memory, hard drive and network utilization data. Collected data then trasmited using http/https protocol to the central repository in order to be aggregated and presented on the user performance control dashboard. In case abnormalities detected for example missing a certain process or watching some of the resource at critical state, a notification will be send to the client.

It helps quickly diagnose or prevent the problem even before it affects user experience, also helps to optimize IT infrastructure investments.

Who should use it: IT operations and managers, webmasters, QA and web developers.

Usage examples: notification in case 100% CPU utilization, low memory, low hard disk space, terminated server process – for example Exchange Server or Database. In case of repeated pattern, then the owner may need to invest for example by adding CPU power or by creating server clusters. QA and Web developers may do load analysis.

5 Reasons for Merging Internal and Exteral Monitoring

Most on-demand website monitoring service providers only provide external website monitoring. Althoug being an important performance control service, external monitoring alone cannot identify the root cause of failures. Merging internal and external monitoring data provides the following benefits:

1. Quickly indentify and fix the cause of failure or slow response, thus reducing site downtime.
2. Fix the issue before it affects end-user experience
3. Understand internal and external user experiences
4. Check network latency and connection failure between you and your business partner and dependant web services.
5. Find causes of past failures by analyzing historical data and plan appropriate infrastructure investments.