Ever since Apple announced that iPhone OS 3.0 will support Push Notifications, every iPhone user has had his adrenaline gushing, thinking about the countless possibilities of the feature and the apps that would incorporate it. Over the past few weeks, we’ve seen a number of developers churn out apps on the App Store that make use of Push Notifications, specially all the IM and Twitter apps. But where else to Push Notifications really make sense? How about Server Monitoring? Is there an app for that?
Now, there is no scarcity of uptime monitoring services out there. Some, like my personal favorite Pingdom, even have their own iPhone app. Sidenote: I wanted to review the app as well, but 30 minutes of usage led me to the conclusion that there’s barely anything to the app. The app kept crashing upon launch on a weak Wi-Fi signal and kept telling me that my server was down, even though I was presently browsing the site on the same network. Also, there’s not much data reported by the app. Then there’s iStat, another server monitoring app with a twist. Instead of monitoring the uptime, it reports server stats such as Load, Memory usage, disk usage, etc. through one of the most gorgeous UIs on the App Store, but they only recently started supporting Linux and Solaris servers. While iStat is a great tool to monitor the stats of your server, you still have to launch the app and check the readings on a frequent basic.
Hey Mister. I thought you were talking about Push Notifications for such apps. Where’s the app for that?
Oh, right. Sorry. Now that I’ve given you an overview of the current apps on the store, I can’t help but wonder why we need to do such a boring and tedious process when you have Push Notifications? David Mytton, over at Boxed Ice have a fantastic web-service to monitor your server statistics called Server Density. The service requires a small python script be run on your server that reports back statistics to the service every 60 seconds. On your account at Server Density, you can set up different type of alerts that are triggered when the criteria is met and you’re notified of that. For example, you can have alerts set if your server load goes above 5, no data is received from the server or if the memory usage goes beyond certain point. The service can alert you via Email or SMS and monitoring one server is completely free of cost.
The service has now launched its iPhone app that allows you to read and monitor your server statistics right at your fingertips. While that in itself is no biggie, the UI that the app brings along is absolutely stunning. When you first launch the app, you are presented with a beautiful (but tapbots-esque) splash screen and 3 dots (lights?) that also act as a little progress indicator and once ready, the app opens its doors to take you to the screen where you need to enter your login information to your account at serverdensity.com. It’s amazing how much work has gone into this screen itself, specially where you are prompted for errors. Once successfully logged in, you are taken to the list of your servers which the app downloads from your account. All through this, the app features subtle animations that keep you hooked. It’s apparent that a lot of thought has been put into the UI and it has been executed just as well. If only other apps on the App Store were this beautiful.
Tapping on the name of a server takes you to the view listing all the stats. Some stats, such as Disk Usage or Network Traffic contain more than one value and can be cycled through by tapping the values.
The app also allows you to view all the alerts you have set for that server (you can set up multiple alerts for different servers and have them notify you either via email, sms or iPhone Push Notification). You may also view the last 5 triggered alerts and their status.
[Full gallery of screenshots here]
A great addition to the app is its support for Push Notifications. When you configure alerts for your server in the web-service, you can have it send alerts to you whenever the alert is triggered. Having tested the app for the last few days, this has turned out to be a great way to monitor the health of your server and actually be on your toes by being warned about any increased activity on it. The fact that you can set up multiple and different kinds of alerts is a great plus point of the service and it evident when you get Push Notifications for things like increasing load of the server.
Caveats:
The Server Density app is available free on the App Store. While that’s a great thing in itself, it only works with the paid accounts of the service (much like the RTM app). So effectively, you have to be paying at least $15/month to use the app and the push notifications. That said, the service is so phenomenal, someone like me who keeps his eyes on multiple servers, it’s better to be notified of problems before the server goes down than being notified that the server is down.
By selling the app free on the App Store but tying it to paid accounts on your web service, you’re effectively avoiding Apple from eating 30% of your revenue.
[Note: The web-service is even more phenomenal than the iPhone app, featuring detailed interactive graphs of the stats, but since that doesn’t fall within the domain of this blog, we’ve not covered that. That said, I definitely recommend the service.]
