PC Monitor is an Irish startup that was born of a simple idea: Why is it so hard to remotely shut down your computer? That’s what its founder and CEO Marius Mihalec asked himself in 2011. Because he wanted to build a modern and extensible service, he decided that just having remote desktop access to a PC wasn’t enough. Instead, he wanted a cloud-hosted solution with a user-friendly mobile app that abstracted the desktop away.
What started out as a very basic idea has now morphed into a full-blown IT monitoring solution for desktops, servers and applications that run in the cloud. The service currently has over 200 enterprise customers that include the likes of Dell, Louis Vuitton, Northwestern University, Condé Nast and British Columbia Institute of Technology.
Using PC Monitor, Mihalec tells me, IT admins can quickly diagnose issues with a given PC, router or other asset remotely and reboot the machine. Users can also get notifications for virtually any event on their machines. Thanks to its API, it’s also essentially a complete monitoring platform that you could use to keep an eye on their machines and servers. When it comes to alerts, Mihalec believes, his solution can go as deep as New Relic.
Because of this extensibility, PC Monitor is now able to natively support Raspberry Pi, too (besides PCs, Macs, Linux machines and .NET and Java apps). Using the company’s standard APIs, Raspberry Pi owners can now use the service to bridge the gap between the real world, hardware connected to the Pi and their mobile devices.
As part of an update the company released today, PC Monitor now also features integrations with PagerDuty to create SMS and phone notifications and ZenDesk to automatically create tickets based on PC Monitor’s notification criteria. The service now also supports VMWare systems, which allow users to check up on their virtual machines and hosts remotely.
“Enterprise IT isn’t typically seen as a business with lots of innovation, but we’ve worked very hard at PC Monitor to provide an amazing product experience to our customers,” Mihalec said. “With these latest product additions, we’re continuing our commitment to our customers to provide an unparalleled experience for IT administrators all over the world.”
PC Monitor is free for users who want to monitor fewer than five systems and just need a single admin account. Subscriptions start at $1 per system/month for those who need to monitor more machines. The service offers mobile apps for iOS, Android and Windows Phone, as well as Metro styles and desktop Windows apps.
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