Android server monitoring app
We’re pleased to announce that our native Server Density server monitoring application for Android 1.6+ is now available in the Android Market! This is free for all trial and paid users and includes the following features:
- View the real time values for all of your monitoring metrics, including plugins.
- Receive push notification alerts.
- View, pause and resume all configured alerts.
- View the latest triggered alerts.
Download now
The Android Market does not provide links so you need to search for “Server Density” to find the app, which requires Android 1.6 or above.
Push notifications
Since Android does not include a push notifications mechanism like iOS, we are using the AirMail Push product from Urban Airship. Unfortunately this requires you to install a separate app (you will be prompted after you log in to the app), but you can decline to install it if you wish.
AirMail includes various options to control how notifications are sent, and the ability to set a quiet time. It’s a one time install for any app that might use their services and means only 1 connection needs to be maintained to remote servers in order to receive notifications. We would prefer a fully native implementation but push notifications are a key feature that AirMail allows us to deliver very efficiently!
We are investigating using the Google C2DM but this is not yet generally available and requires Android 2.2.
Graphing
There are currently no graphs because there are no good graphing libraries available for Android. Once a good library becomes available we will look at adding this functionality, but until then you can still access the web UI from the Android browser as our web based graphs are written in JS and will work in all modern browsers.
iPhone app updates
The Android app uses our new (and currently unreleased) API 1.1 which allows us to show all of your metrics. As Apple users ourselves, we really want this functionality on our iPhones + iPads so this is something we are working on for the next iPhone app release.
That looks like a really nice addition to your service David. Really like your work.
Cheers
Mark
You can provide links to things in the Android market and save your users searching. There are 2 ways:
1) use http://market.android.com/search?q=pname: (eg com.serverdensity.blah) – the more specific you are in the package name the better.
2) Pass 1) to the Google chart api and generate a QR code eg
http://chart.apis.google.com/chart?chs=150×150&cht=qr&chl=http://market.android.com/search?q=pname:com.serverdensity&choe=ISO-8859-1
any Android user can then either click on the link n their phone or scan the QR code. No fuss, no mess and no mistyping.
HTH
ScaredyCat
Thanks. We’ll use the QR code on our product page on the main site which will go up later today.
Sorry to be a PITA, but I’ve also found you a pretty good charting library (intent based)
http://code.google.com/p/chartdroid/
ScaredyCat
Thanks, will check it out.
Nice write-up. Awesome to see the conversation your blog post has sparked. It’s always great to see the other solutions people come up with for these types of problems.
Wish you would find a different way then airmail… the author has dropped support an will no longer provide updates… reading the reviews on android market show shotty reliability at best… for something as critical as server monitoring we want a better solution… by the way the author donated the source code to the creator of websms… which looks like a crap app… so maybe contact the author of airmail and see if you can use and improve upon the code for server density
Support for AirMail has not been dropped and the app is actively maintained. Unfortunately it is the best option for supporting all Android OS versions.