Server Density, from Boxed Ice, is just the app all you server administrators out there have been waiting for to take your monitoring out on the road. Sure, you could wait for the boss to call you in the middle of the night because he can't get an e-mail that he absolutely must have at 3:00 AM, but it's so much more impressive to be awake when that call comes in and to tell him that you're already on it. Server Density is a client-server software set designed to take the guess work out of server monitoring.
Let's dive into it more after the break.
After installing an app on each of the servers you want to monitor, another server polls the servers for useful data such as low disk space, connectivity issues, or critical processes that are not running. You are able to customize the alerts per server, and the app will report to your monitoring server when any of the alerts are tripped. You may purchase a license and run your own monitoring server, or you may choose to have Boxed Ice host your monitoring server for you and pay a monthly fee instead. That's not what I'm here to talk about, though. Let's take a look at the app for Android.
When you first start the app, you are given boxes for username, password, and the URL. The URL is where you will specify your monitoring server for the app to connect to. Once you log in, you are presented with a list of the servers you have set up. Tap one, and you are given some basic system information, such as free and available memory and disk space, network statistics, and how hard the CPU is working.
On the alerts tab, you are able to view the alerts that you have configured. Alerts can be stopped or started here, so once you have acknowledged a particular alert, you can pause the monitoring so your phone stops blowing up in your pocket (or on the restaurant table in front of you). The app can also be configured to receive push alerts from the monitoring server, which is a necessary feature for any critical server monitoring software.
This is something I wish I had at my disposal at previous jobs. It definitely takes the guesswork out of server monitoring, and when combined with the powerful alerts in Android you won't have to worry when you're away from a computer.
