by Hovhannes Avoyan
| Apr 27, 2007
With this post we explain the missions, similarities and differences between two of our monitoring services: monitor.us and Paid Monitor. We launched monitor.us as a free website monitoring service year ago at CeBIT 2006 gigantic trade show in Hannover. At CeBIT 2007 this year we launched Paid Monitor, a premium monitoring. Now there are two monitoring services in the market, and it needs explanation. The objective of this post is to clarify the fundamental rationale for existence of the two.
monitor.us and Paid Monitor are complimentary services with different missions built on the same core.
What is different between monitor.us and Paid Monitor?
There are different intentions behind these two services and different business models. Similarly the usage scenarios, provided benefits, feature accents and target user groups are different although overlapping. Due to these differences the services can be used complimentary to each other.
monitor.us is a free web monitoring, analytics and research tool. The business model is based on online advertisements, and its free nature and easy-to-use Ajax interface encourage large community participation. Because it is free and unlimited, our users monitor not only their own sites, but also their clients, friends, partners, suppliers, customers, hosting providers, competitors, portals and other sites. The large and fast growing monitoring data provides solid foundation for comprehensive industry research and analytics. We realize that monitor.us is a very unique service at the market. It is not just free monitoring tool (some companies provide limited free monitoring), but also and increasingly more a research, business intelligence and analysis tool. And the more people participate the more value it provides to the community.
The target users are low-budget small businesses, web development companies with large portfolio of client sites, business analysts, managers, non-profit organizations, government, journalists, webmasters and individuals. monitor.us may also serve as a play ground to experience benefits of website monitoring for newcomers. Another important monitor.us target group includes magazines and business analysts, who are looking for industry-specific performance data to obtain broader picture, perform business intelligence and competitive research.
monitor.us roadmap includes advanced and unique research, collaboration and analytic tools: soon-to-be-launched hosting performance ranking will help our community to compare and find reliable hosting providers; public widgets will allow putting the performance reports directly on user sites and share; industrial and customer-segmented performance indexes will allow our users to build their own comparative performance indexes and publish them.
Paid Monitor is a professional on-demand monitoring and systems management tool. The business model is based on paid subscriptions. Paid Monitor provides professional monitoring and systems management features, dedicated for mission critical applications and IT operations. Those monitor.us users who need frequent website monitoring, SMS notifications and systems management tools can migrate to Paid Monitor or use both services complimentary. Paid Monitor currently provides several basic monitoring plans, a number of advanced features and packages scheduled to launch later this year. At Paid Monitor we also provide tailor-made on-promise monitoring solutions for mid to large enterprises (contact us for more info).
Paid Monitor typical users are business and technical staff of companies running mission critical website and IT systems, who are interested in continuous business operations, advanced preventive diagnostics and effective systems management tools. Paid Monitor provides benefits for:
- Business management – to have better control and ability in setting measurable goals to IT, sales and marketing departments using variety of Key Performance Indicators (KPIs) provided by Paid Monitor;
- IT operations – as a cost-effective tool for objective measuring of availability and performance both internally and from end-user perspective, for diagnosing, fixing and preventing IT failures, capacity planning and systems management automation;
- Sales, PR and Marketing – for better understanding web customers – where do they come from, who refers them, how long they stay on the site, where do they go and other metrics related to effectiveness and popularity of their site; for PR and advertisement campaigns control and optimization, for trends discovery and more.
- Customer care – to ensure customer satisfactions and control Service Level Agreements (SLA).
What is in common between monitor.us and Paid Monitor?
Both services are based on the same core. Having different models and features, they are based on the same monitoring core components. It helps to provide robust, effective and scalable monitoring engine to the wide range of users from an individual site owner to a large corporation with thousands of servers and complex IT operations. We are using open source software both to provide reasonable price, as well as to build a robust architecture based on proven software components (see monitor.us open source stack post). We build both systems utilizing scalable and flexible Service Oriented Architecture, which help us to be fast in delivering leading edge features to our users.
Finally, both tools utilize software as a service (SaaS) or also called on-demand approach, when software is hosted and maintained by a vendor of that software, which makes it much more cost-effective and reliable for users. No needs for dedicated servers, maintenance staff, learning and training, backups etc. No a need for updates and patches – the vendor (we) makes the updates and our users have always the latest version. No upfront license cost.
Summary
monitor.us and Paid Monitor are different services with their distinct missions designed to serve different groups and needs. monitor.us has frequent release cycles, is community and research focused. Paid Monitor designed to be slightly conservative, robust and with more professional systems management features. Combined they represent a comprehensive and powerful tool set.
Both services serve the needs to increase return on IT investments, optimize the cost, ensure business operations continuity, improve customers satisfaction, increase web customers base and web-generated profit, reduce downtime loses. In order to better server those growing and changing needs our new features introduction speed has been unprecedented in past, and we will keep the same pace all over 2007.
[tags] monitor.us, paid-monitor, monitoring, website monitoring, server monitoring, systems management, analytics, web analytics, web statistics, customer care, web marketing, uptime monitoring, SLA, remote monitoring, websites, tools, webmasters, external monitoring, network monitoring[/tags]
