Monitoring From The Cloud: Monitis Versus Open-source Monitoring Software

Ensuring Service Levels Are Met, Getting Robust Warnings

If your company is using a complex IT infrastructure and you are responsible for delivering mission critical applications, and every time the system is down you get complaints from end-users or your supervisor, then consider hosted monitoring. Its safe and gives you greater control of your systems uptime.

Cloud-based technology like Monitis will provide the surest, most reliable coverage and alert you of emerging problems that need immediate attention, even when your network is down! The cloud is also best equipped to keep tabs on your service agreement with cloud platforms.

What makes Monitis a truly killer technology is its robust notification and alerting system. If you are using open-source, there is a good chance you will miss an alert particularly when:

Your local network is down because of connection or switch problems

Your monitoring server is down itself

Your mail server is down; so it cannot deliver alert emails

Your firewall or router is down

Your ISP is experiencing connectivity issues

What makes hosted monitoring solutions like Monitis special is the independent alerting and notifications. Even if your network is completely down, you will get alerted. To ensure robust notifications, Monitis:

Checks remotely whether your internal monitoring agents are up and responding

Checks externally if web services are available for end users

Double checks from multiple locations across the globe or from a location your company establishes

Provides multiple ways to notify, for example, via SMS, Live-Voice, IM, Email and Twitter

Sets notification escalation procedures

The bottom line is that Monitis ensures you will get an alert when something is wrong or going wrong in your network regardless of your network status.

Ease of Deployment, Ease of use

Another advantage that cloud-based tools hold over open-source monitoring software is rapid, instant deployment. It takes a mere 10 minutes to sign up for and use Monitis monitoring (including instant availability of SMS and Live-Voice alerting), while installing open-source monitoring requires setting up a dedicated server, database and, of course, the actual monitoring software. In addition, open-source tools require IT administrators to:

Set distributed monitoring agents, opening firewalls

Set and manage monitoring web servers and databases

Manage notification channels

Manage external access

Integrate third-party visualization tools

Regularly patch and update the software

Configure checks and views

Integrate third-party plug-ins

All these means time and money for companies. Monitis, on the other hand, via its cloud technology, is updated automatically and seamlessly without the users participation, which means companies always use the latest version.

Ensuring Supreme End-user Experience by External Monitoring

Another important feature of any monitoring tool is the ability to monitor servers and networks from outside your company. Here again, cloud technology holds many advantages over open-source and internal software. Monitis has multiple monitoring locations around the world, from which it can perform basic availability, advanced real-browser monitoring, and script-based synthetic monitoring (allowing companies to test capacity and chart out strategies for heavy user loads)indeed an entire end-to-end monitoring flow.

Meanwhile, open-source monitoring can only monitor within a companys firewall (which means the software can theoretically measure a false positive, although the network may be down). Plus, open-source doesnt measure user experience on an end-to-end basis.

Scalability

Open source products like Nagios usually dont scale well for companies with large IT infrastructures. Its a common complaint from enterprises that, when using more than 100 devices, the open-source products fail. As recently posted at Google Marketplace by Danny O., a Monitis customer:

Before finding Monitis, I was using a couple of open source tools including Nagios and grew frustrated with two things: 1 It wasn't scalable enough to monitor our 300+ websites and 2 It required hours of configuration. With Monitis, within a half hour of signing up, we were able to monitor all our websites, as well as 15 servers and a web-based application. It's a one-of-a-kind service, and I highly recommend it to anyone.

The Monitis platform does hundreds of millions of checks per day well below the technologys capacity limits.

Ownership Costs and Productivity

Why should you pay for computing power and capacity that you dont need now but might down the road?

With Monitis, companies enjoy the ability to add scalability as needed, and they pay only for what they use. If they need more monitoring down the line, they pay for more. Its a different story for open-source monitoring, though. Open-source does not scale well beyond 100 servers, plus your company is required to provide good hardware (servers) and storage space.

The total cost of ownership (TCO) of monitoring tools must also be considered. Because companies pay only for what they use with cloud-based monitoring, typical costs start at just a few dollars per month. Plus, factoring in labor costs, firms save enormous sums because IT folks spend just minutes on daily routine and upkeep instead of hours.

For open-source tools, however, the tab for monitoring is high. Consider these costs:

$2,000 + for a server

$2,000 + for a backup server and storage

$1,000 yearly per server for electricity

Setup and maintenance labor cost (usually a dedicated or a part time resource at least $30,000 per year) to do such things as:

oAdd plug-ins

oBackup data

oFix issues, patching

oUpdate software

oSetup monitoring and alerting

oControlling third-party notification services

oCustomize

oAdd reports

oConsolidate SLA and performance data from multiple monitoring

In comparison, Monitis operates much more efficiently as there is little to no maintenance, allowing your IT administrators to be more productive; the technology is constantly updated with new features that all users receive instantly. Response support is substantial at no additional cost, and there is no need to use multiple tools.

Our top priority is to provide excellent customer support. Our customers satisfaction levels are a major differentiator between Monitis and open-source.

The Cool Factor

And then theres the cool factor. Whats not cool is the need to install, upgrade and maintain software, which is part of open-source. The IT community is starting to embrace cloud-based monitoring because it utilizes modern architectures like:

The Cloud and Web 2.0 approach

Multi-tenant, on-demand software as a service (lower user costs)

An all-in-one solution (monitoring everything from servers to networks, from Java apps to cloud providers)

Service Oriented Architecture and web services (We offer web API for 3rd party integration, web widgets to embed in 3rd party applications and websites.)

Scalability to suit your changing computing needs

What makes Monitis cloud-based solution truly different is how we listen to our customers. As we host the product, we know at all times how companies use it, and that lets us know how we can improve it to suit their needs.

Dashboard as a Service

The ability to communicate fast and thoroughly is critical for a monitoring tool, and Monitis makes it easy and more efficient via a hosted dashboard, that is:

Customizable and available from anywhere, on any device

Offers multiple alert notification channels as an out-of the box service

A means of communication across silos which allows customers to share the same data between network, system, application and database administrators

Any data can be fed into it via our open API, allowing easy integration with other enterprise systems

Helpful in aligning business and technical goals, making it suitable for both IT and business users

Good dashboards are typically missing in open-source monitoring products. Or if good, they require multiple modules or integrations. Dashboards are also limited to each product and lack flexibility or ease of integration with other products. Theyre not very high-priority to the average user, as theyre usually designed for techies.

All in all, when considering monitoring systems, its wise to think hard about the benefits of one type technology versus another in this case the clear efficiencies and savings provided by cloud-based monitoring, such as Monitis, versus open-source tools.

10-point Summary

Heres a quick 10-point summary of Monitis advantages over Open-Source Monitoring software. Monitis offers:

1.Robust alert notifications

2.Ease of setup and customization

3.Ease of use

4.Low TCO

5.Scalability

6.Reach UI, collaboration and control dashboard

7.Consumes fewer resources, Greener

8.End-to-end monitoring, External + Internal

9.An innovative, leading edge system. Web 2.0 architecture

10.A proven way to boost productivity and save time

by: monitis

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