Kick-starting an Iphone app review cycle, first up is one of the most useful app’s I have for server monitoring.
R-U-ON http://www.r-u-on.com/ is a great service, which has a free level and a paid. Personally I used the free service for several years, now I use the paid service.
The Iphone app works with both absolutely fine. Basically you create an account and then download a small program called an “agent”, this is set running or installed on your computer or server – these agents then connect to the r-u-on servers and send information.
You can get information about several things, most useful to myself is disk space, virtual memory usage, ram usage, cpu and load stats. If any of these exceed limits set (you can customise them). Critical failures can be notified by text message (theres a fee involved for this) which is absolutely essential.
The IPhone app simply connects to the r-u-on account and shows a summary, of your alarms (server’s which have exceeded a notification threshold – see the graphic below for this), or general server status – which hopefully is all green and show’s that all your servers are running well. You can also view your trouble tickets, personally I’ve never done this and have no real idea what it is.
The only thing missing from the app is the ability for it to run in the background, though of course the Apple SDK does forbid this – bah! however it would be great if it could or some kind of background notification system used (which I believe may be available in OS 3.0 but not 100% sure).