Essential sysadmin iPhone apps
We have previously looked at Android vs iPhone as a mobile operating system for sysadmins but the OS is only the platform for the apps which perform the functions you actually need.
There are a couple of posts elsewhere (Pingdom, Geek Technica, iWeb) online that run through many of the different apps you should have. These include network tests, domain registration and such. Really though, you only need a select few – if your server is down you don’t need to be running network tests, you want to know what’s wrong and be able to fix it. I don’t like to have many apps on my phone and only really use a few. As such, this list is a “top few” apps to get the job done.
External monitoring – Pingdom
iTunes link – free
If your website is down the first time you’ll hear about it is probably through an external monitoring service. We recommend Pingdom for this as it is well priced (you don’t pay ridiculously high fees for more frequent checks for example) and covers almost everything you need (except alerts on response time). You specify a service (a URL, port, e-mail, DNS etc) and it will monitor it from multiple locations.
They originally had an awful iPhone app but recently released a new version, completely redesigned with graphs and push notifications. It’s also free and works with both their subscription and free accounts.
Internal monitoring – Server Density
iTunes link – free
Once you get your Pingdom alerts, you need to find out what’s going on with your servers. Using our iPhone app you can check the latest stats and look at graphs for the last 12 hours or 30 days. The app is free for paid and trial Server Density users and includes push notifications.
Remote access – iSSH
iTunes link – £2.39 / $3.99
I have tried a lot of the different SSH apps for iPhone and this is the best – the others either don’t have the right features or are buggy. The most important feature for me is the ability to generate and use SSH keys. All our servers are keypair only and having an iPhone device specific key means it’s easy to revoke if necessary. It also saves remembering passwords. It also supports VNC and X Server.
Bonus – VPN
iPhone OS 3.0 built in – Free
All our servers are behind a Cisco hardware firewall and accessible only via VPN. One of the great things about the iPhone is v3.0 includes a built in IPSec Cisco client so I only need to flip a switch and enter my password to connect to the internal network and then the servers themselves.
And those are all you need to ensure you know the status of your servers and can then access them when things go wrong.
