

Ask HN: iPhone? Blackberry? Android? Prayer? - How do you remotely monitor your startup? - RKlophaus

In the next week or two I plan to update my cell phone.<p>Besides the usual requirements, I want to use my new phone to monitor and tweak servers remotely via web and ssh.<p>I'm leaning toward an iPhone because I'm a huge fan of Apple, but I previously owned a Blackberry and was happy.<p>Anyone else using their phone to be a one-man IT army? Any recommendations? What is the ideal setup?
======
e1ven
I find that it takes a combination of tools, the key is a Blackberry and
Nagios-

Nagios is a tool to automatically check machines for problems- It's very
convenient in that I can highly vary the configuration for each machine- Dev
machines might only be checked every 15 minutes, where productions machines
might be checked every minute.

I have it parsing a variety of log files, and sending me emails when it finds
different errors, or warnings.

The Blackberry is irreplaceable in this context- While I have an iPhone for my
home calls and for testing mobile versions of our product, the iPhone mail
client is next to useless.

It doesn't have any filtering or searching at all- That's fine for emails to
friends, but it's worthless for monitoring.

The Blackberry, on the other hand, allows me to set a filter for certain
messages, such as those with "ERROR" in the subject, to be "Level 1" messages,
which I can treat differently.

For example, a normal message might vibrate the Blackberry, where as a Level 1
message is set to ring my BB increasingly louder until I manually check and
clear it..

This ensures that if I'm sleeping, and we have a site-down-event, it'll wake
me up and make me respond, even if I'm rather out of it.

With the iPhone, on the other hand, it's all or nothing.

Ideally, I'd prefer an app using the iPhone's push notification (whenever it
arrives), that would allow me to use XML push requests for different alerts..
I could send an XML Warning, Error, or Fatal Error, for instance.

I'd settle for an email client with proper filters on either device, though..

The second point is search- The iPhone doesn't allow me to search through
prior emails, which is ironic given the publicity of spotlight on the desktop.
With my BB, I can search by day, sender, subject, etc; This is a necessity
when trying to understand the context on a discussion.

Third- The BB email is much, much faster. Because it has real push email, I
can get messages before they appear on my desktop- This is crucial for alerts.
There is no good way to do this on the iPhone, without forwarding all my mail
through Yahoo. Zimbra on the server side, connecting to a BES server is a
cheap and reliable solution.

So far, I haven't been impressed with ANY terminal applications- The iPhone's
screen is too small, and too much space is taken up by the virtual keyboard on
these, and the BB doesn't include any useful keys, like pipe or backtick on
the default screen. Normally, I use the phones to receive information, and
then fire up my laptop + Aircard to fix it.

~~~
RKlophaus
Colin - Excellent, excellent post. This is exactly the type of feedback I was
looking for. Definitely pushes me in the direction of a Blackberry. Thanks!

------
tuukkah
I prefer an n810 (great screen, hardware keyboard, Linux) with internet access
over bluetooth and a small cell phone.

~~~
RKlophaus
Hmm... interesting. If I were to go that route I would probably get an Asus
eee instead.

~~~
tuukkah
At least for me, it's important that the n810 fits in the pocket like an
iPhone, unlike a netbook.

------
cbarning
iPhone

------
shergill
iPHone. :)

~~~
RKlophaus
That's my top choice so far, but it's for emotional reasons more than
anything. :)

Can you elaborate on your reasons for suggesting the iPhone?

