Service monitoring
- Platform: Android
- Language: Javascript, PHP, Html
- Other used: Apache Cordova
History
I have a friend who installs CCTV surveillance camera systems, and I help him often. With time, as his business grew, and he got goverment works too, there came the need for monitoring these systems remotely.
There were usually problems with ISPs, power blackouts, etc... And the customer never cares what's the problem, or whose fault is it. The customer wants a working service. 24/7. Period.
First time we were playing with email notifications, but it was too complicated to track which system is down, and which is working.
The solution
I thought the PHP Server Monitor script will be a good start for us, with altering the code for our needs to check the endpoint systems. With some tricks and scripts, I was able to make the first working version of our (not so) great monitoring page.
It was working, but it's absolutely not so comfortable to login to websites on your phone when you are for eg. travelling. Getting the address from the bookmarks, trying to login, and to remember your password...
We needed a very simple one click (tap) solution.
Apache Cordova
Apache Cordova is a very good idea at all. It allows you to encapsulate your web apps into native android apps, with slight modifications. It lasts about a day until you install every prerequisites (on linux :D), but it worth the time.
So finally our one click android app was born. And we was able to see every outages, and find the root cause of some anomalies. For example, when a maintenance person powered down a facility every day at 4PM... :D