System Manager App Brain Storming

[Tom]

I could use a little help with the over all design of this app.

I know what I would like in this app, but I'm just one person, and don't work in day to day system administration. A couple of you do

So what kind of features would you think are absolutely necessary, and what would be "nice to have"?

I've been trying to think of what the entry/first page to the app should be. First idea is just the plain old list of manageable machines, be they standalone computers, hypervisors, VPSs, or even containers. Second idea is a general overview "dashboard" like thing, where you can see general stats and health of your managed machines. It could also be a combination.

The basic plan so far is to be a tool you can use on your phone or tablet (or maybe tv?) to manage multiple machines remotely, this includes entire VPS services like AWS, Digital Ocean, OpenStack or libvirt hosts, and down to physical individual computers. I am /thinking/ about managing at the service level (ie: higher level app level) as well, but haven't put a ton of thought into that quite yet. Eventually I want to support as many "orchestration" services as possible.

Please list anything you can think of, even if it seems bleedingly obvious to you. I do have plans already, but I want to see what you guys have to say

[Lazybones]

Scope could go wild with this.. as a sole develper you should probably create a mission statement as to what you want to do BETTER than existing tools. Especially popular open source tools.

Are you a monitoring tool?
Logging tool?
System management tool?
All of the above?

Look at http://www.zabbix.com/ for example it supports scripted monitors, application level monitors and common protocols such as WMI, and SNMP.

Going after corporate cloud? You should hook to both Azure and AWS.

[Tom]

The fun part is there aren't any good android apps for this at all. I'm starting with basic'ish monitoring and management.

It will initially be targeting virtual/cloud, but I do want to add SNMP support at some point. Application level monitoring will come at some point as well, but not sure what that'll look like. It will not be part of the first release.

The "best" android app I found for this lets you log into libvirt hosts and do some basic stuff, and it looks like butt. The rest that I tried are just plain broken.

My goal for this is to be a one stop shop for real time monitoring and basic management of cloud resources, and eventually local non cloud boxes as well.

[Lazybones]

I have seen a few larger products that have Apps as alternative interfaces to their web UIs.

A monitoring product from my point of view is first and foremost there to alert me of problems, then it just happens to be NICE if I can get more details from an interface on my phone.

Again I think rounding out the plan more might be an idea.

Personally I would look for a good monitoring tool that has an API and create a UI for it.

Personally I would start by creating a cloud service that has a responsive UI, then later creating a native app experience for any platforms that stand out as being popular and could benefit from a native app.

[Lazybones]

First and foremost OpManager is a web UI based tool, but it does have a mobile optimized optional front end.
https://www.manageengine.com/network-monitoring/apps.html

[Tom]

Heres my goal: A native,  easy to use management and monitoring  app for android.

It may not have all of the features of the big boys but but should be possible to do a lot of the things you need to do from anywhere.

[Lazybones]

Heres my goal: A native,  easy to use management and monitoring  app for android.

It may not have all of the features of the big boys but but should be possible to do a lot of the things you need to do from anywhere.

So first and foremost it is a configuration management front end, but with a little real time status info?

[Tom]

Heres my goal: A native,  easy to use management and monitoring  app for android.

It may not have all of the features of the big boys but but should be possible to do a lot of the things you need to do from anywhere.

So first and foremost it is a configuration management front end, but with a little real time status info?

Yeah, and there will be notifications for various things.