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Everything about Web and Network Monitoring

Paid Monitor Monitoring and Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud: A Perfect Mix

by | Jul 24, 2009

A Quick Glance

Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2  –  https://aws.amazon.com/ec2/ ) is a web service that provides resizable compute capacity that is designed to make web-scale computing easier for developers and web-based businesses by accommodating them with the tools to build failure resilient applications. Amazon EC2 provides the user with complete control of their computing resources by allowing administrators to quickly scale capacity as their requirements change.  Amazon EC2 allows the user to quickly upscale or down scale depending on the computing needs which therefore reduces the required time to obtain and boot new servers. Using Amazon EC 2 allows the user to pay only for the capacity that was actually used. Developers can use Amazon EC 2’s tools to create applications which are failure resilient and are also protected from common failures. EC2 provides you complete control of computing resources and runs efficiently on Amazon’s proven computing environment.

As an industry leader in the fields of affordable performance monitoring and management software as a service, Paid Monitor (portal.monitor.us) provides services to over 50,000 customers; whose backgrounds range from small businesses and educational institutions to Fortune 500 companies and government agencies. Paid Monitor provides its customers with improved IT administrator productivity, reduced system downtime, and lower operational expenditure. Paid Monitor ensures that its changes to system monitoring and the management landscape furnish its customers with easy to use and manage, inexpensive, and versatile software-as-a-service (SaaS) performance monitoring and management solutions, with deployment configurations of both shared internal and shared external cloud.

Paid Monitor offers software for monitoring and management of large scale web applications. Aimed for the enterprise level and thoroughly developed according to increasing requirements of real-world applications, Paid Monitor products are a premier solution for monitoring of software running in the cloud (www.monitorcloud.com/monitorcloud). The products are available through SaaS) model and integrate well with Amazon EC2 cloud computing web services, including a local monitoring server at Amazon and Amazon payments.

Paid Monitor is the first on-demand management and monitoring system to be offered with Amazon’s payment system through Amazon Web Services.  Paid Monitor customers were way out front in using virtualization and cloud services.  For cloud-based applications, Paid Monitor is a pioneer provider of this software and is keeping up with requirements to monitor and manage the next generation of software.


Why is Page Load Time Important?

It is evident that it doesn’t take long for small increments in web page load time to add up to big costs for online businesses. Did you know that every 100 ms of wait time costs Amazon 1% of profit, and every 0.5 seconds added to search page generation on Google drops traffic by 20%? Application latency continues to be a problem for Web 2.0 companies. To combat this issue, Paid Monitor has added Amazon EC2 monitoring location to its network which will be monitored locally and provide performance data as if it were operating in the customer’s local network. Causes of such latency can be the user infrastructure, the EC2 instance, or the applications themselves.

Having global network coverage, Paid Monitor external monitoring will add extra value for Amazon cloud users  by simulating the actions of end users from several countries across the globe by monitoring and reporting the load time of web content from US, Europe, Asia, South America, and Australia which, in turn, will ensure a seamless user experience in web applications.

Paid Monitor Provides Holistic View for Cloud Computing Performance

Have you ever wondered how companies view the performance and maintain the health of their applications? With Paid Monitor, IT administrators are able to have an integrated performance dashboard with a single consolidated view for performance values from sources such as: external Paid Monitor worldwide monitoring network, client deployed Paid Monitor agents, web page traffic statistics, cloud providers API’s like Amazon, search engine site rankings, and application’s external multi-step transaction monitors.

All these are done to help the company to keep track of their external cloud services as well as monitor their internal infrastructure. This makes Paid Monitor a true software-as-a-service, the first of its kind. Other features of Paid Monitor include the ability to discover, monitor and manage virtual server and software services automatically. All cloud-computing needs are supported by Paid Monitor on demand instant deployment, extensibility and flexibility.

Using the Paid Monitor Amazon EC2 System allows you to do the following tasks:

  1. Ability to monitor the total number of running Amazon virtual server instances.
  2. In the event of server failures, notifications concerning the event can be triggered.
  3. A message can be received when the number of servers using Amazon Compute Cloud exceeds certain limits.
  4. Web services, databases, mail servers, TCP ports, telnet, and SSH can be monitored based on user rules for the new servers.
  5. Monitors and notification rules are added automatically for the newly launched servers.
  6. Server performance and utilization of resources can be monitored once the Paid Monitor Agent is automatically installed.
  7. Virtual server’s CPU, memory, storage and processes can be monitored by the Paid Monitor Agent.
  8. To prevent and predict outages in the servers, rules can be enabled in the Paid Monitor Amazon EC2 monitoring system.
  9. Notices of server failure can be received earlier with automatic server failure notice.
  10. Configuration monitoring features are also provided with Paid Monitor Amazon EC2.

EC2 monitoring is a recent addition to Paid Monitor server and network monitoring service. It significantly automates monitoring jobs for AWS cloud resources. It gives transparency in resource consumption, operational performance and performance metrics including factors like CPU consumption, disk activities, and web traffic. It makes use of Amazon API for easy service administration. It has the following winning features for cloud monitoring:

  1. Is a lightweight tool and is easy to set up.
  2. Has good performance and rich user interface
  3. Can be easily adjusted to suit customer needs.
  4. Watches the key cloud metrics.
  5. Fits better to cloud services than the heavier counterparts.
  6. Is inexpensive and uses “pay as use” payment method.

Paid Monitor Cloud Monitor addresses the above issues by polling running instances, recording newly started and terminated instances, and performing actions based on user defined rules. Paid Monitor Cloud Monitor keeps control over running EC2 servers. When the EC2 management software for instance experiences heavy load on the EC2 servers it will launch an additional instance of the EC2 server to distribute workload.  This will cause problems because one does not have control over how many instances of the server is launched and its settings. Paid Monitor Cloud Monitor will provide a user with a poll of running instances after he/she has entered the AWS account details. Paid Monitor Cloud Monitor will record newly started and terminated instances and additionally it will handle the user defined rules. For instance, when an additional EC2 server is launched, the system may alert the user or setup an additional monitor for a new instance of the EC2 server.

EC2 offers virtual server with different versions of operating systems like Linux, Windows and Open Solaris.  Paid Monitor offers agents for all these platforms and it can mechanically set up its software agent for checking server CPU, load, and storage space and resource consumption. It can also initiate external http, ping, and data record or any other monitoring. Clients can prescribe notification policies similar to “warn me when the number of instances exceeds ten”, to ascertain the reason for starting such a large number of instances. Users can also give instructions to notify when CPU consumption exceeds 80% of the capacity, and to add an agent when a fresh instance begins and launch CPU plus storage monitoring. Thus, the new Paid Monitor Cloud service is effective in time management as also in the management of clients’ infrastructure.

Paid Monitor provides the following advantages for EC2 users:

  1. Containment of potential run-away costs of mis-configured or faulty auto-scaling of the service by providing customizable user alerts in a timely manner.
  2. Automatic monitoring of performance and up-time of EC2-hosted web sites. This is much simpler to accomplish than using external services since URL discovery can be automated as virtual servers come online.
  3. Configuration options to seamlessly aler the user as new instances are launched and terminated.
  4. Logging of virtual server events and performance history to aid fault-finding and root cause analysis.
  5. Application monitoring for each virtual server as well as other server parameters to simplify the management of multiple cloud-based servers.

Paid Monitor combined with Amazon EC2 is truly a perfect mix. The efficiency and the reliability provided by the system is yet unmatched. Any IT developer or site administrator would definitely find Paid Monitor a must for server management. To get more information about Paid Monitor, please visit https://portal.monitor.us.

[tag] cloud monitoring, ec2 monitoring, server monitoring, paid-monitor, website monitoring, performance monitoring, monitoring saas, systems monitoring [/tag]

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Hovhannes Avoyan

About Hovhannes Avoyan

Paid Monitor CEO – Hovhannes is an international entrepreneur with a recognized and respected reputation in the high tech industry. His technical expertise, combined with his drive to build the best business/product, has positioned him as a visionary international extension of Silicon Valley.

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