Elite Email is Canada’s largest cloud-based email marketing solution provider.  It’s success is built on a commitment to helping customers’ businesses succeed by providing the best possible solutions and optimizing them for each company’s unique needs.  This dedication to customer success necessitates high-performance monitoring of Elite Email’s services so that any potential degradation can be identified before it causes downtime and customer dissatisfaction.

To keep their solution up and running, Elite Email have 26 staff in Canada, the US and India, along with 5 data centers in North America and a total of 12 servers worldwide. Elite Email use Monitis to test and maintain server performance around the world and to monitor mission critical apps.

Monitis interviewed Elite Email’s President, Robert Burko, to learn more about why they chose Monitis and how they use it:

Q: Prior to using Monitis, how did you monitor web optimization and why did you feel you needed to make a change?

A: Previously, we had used both Nagios and Pingdom.  While they were fine solutions, Monitis was more enterprise-focused, its dashboards were better, and the transaction robot was a huge plus, allowing us to see very granular server performance data worldwide, 24×7.

Q: What do you use Monitis for?

A: We use it for virtually everything, especially mission critical apps.  We even use it for the staging servers before anything goes live, so we can test out the performance ahead of time.

We also use Monitis’ customized alerts to help notify our correct employees in various regions when a problem is encountered, eliminating delays in action. Monitis’ transaction monitoring capabilities provide an additional layer of granular monitoring by allowing us to automatically simulate the end-user experience and report back when online processes fail. Additionally, Monitis quickly determines if there is a local ISP issue that could affect our customers.

Q: Have you spotted performance issues that you couldn’t before, using Monitis?

A: Yes.  In fact, we were recently getting hit by a small DDoS attack. We spotted the strange spike in traffic using Monitis and were able to put a stop to it without losing one second of uptime.  Most solutions of this kind only tell you whether a server is up or down, but Monitis gives us real-time insight about anomalous behavior and overall health.

Q: Has Monitis improved your workflows or shortened processes at all?

A: The biggest time saving has really come from the customized alerts Monitis provides that help notify certain people at certain times 24×7 – Nagios didn’t have those.  Our staff in India are alerted during their business hours of any problems while it’s the middle of the night for our US team.  This ensures that any issues are addressed immediately and there are no delays in notification. Also, if we have someone at a certain location that can’t get to our service, Monitis can show whether there is a local ISP issue or whether our server is really down and the cause of the problem. 

Indeed, it would seem that Monitis’ help in keeping Elite Email’s servers up and customer satisfaction high is central to keeping Elite Email, well, elite.