Centreon enjoys the privilege of being backed by a community of open source experts. Some are not only busy during the day mastering complex IT environments, they also work altruistically on their own time to contribute to the entire IT monitoring family.
In this post, we’re introducing two members of the Centreon open source community, Jérôme Maillot, hailing from France and Mario Haider, from Austria. Both have developed mobile apps for you to be able to get monitoring alerts on the go, on Androïd and iOS. Let’s learn more about them and their contribution to the Centreon Community.
What have you been up to? Anything Centreon can do to help? Contact us with your project and we’ll be pleased to feature it in our blog.
Jérôme Maillot: Mobile IT monitoring for Android users
Tell us about your app and what made you build it, Jérôme…
The web is my playground. For the past 12 years, my mission has been to ensure that websites and apps run seamlessly. Day to day, Centreon has been a huge help for monitoring and managing alerts.
At some point, I just wanted to roam free from the desktop! I felt it would be neat to be able to keep an eye on the status of the system, be alerted in real time if there was a problem, and connect to machines straight from my mobile device—wherever I was.
It took me about three months to make this idea a reality, building what would become DroidEon. I launched the Android app in February 2018. The challenging part was ensuring the app would support current and all previous Centreon versions. I spent a certain amount of time working around some missing APIs to develop essential functionalities, like deleting timeouts, but in the end it all worked out.
I was apparently not the only one needing additional mobility on my IT monitoring—over five hundred users have since downloaded the app and virtually all are still active users.
I have recently upgraded the app to include multiple setups. I’d love to hear back from the Centreon community on how I could improve the app.
DroidEon can be downloaded from the Google Play Store and I can be reached on GitHub.
Happy and safe mobile monitoring to all!
Jérôme
Mario Haider: Mobile IT monitoring for iOS (iPhones or iPads) users
Hello Mario, what can you tell us about your work and the app you developed?
I’m a full-time system and network administrator for an ISP in Vienna, and you guessed it, I enjoy coding. I also happen to love cycling, traveling, and a good night of sleep … all of which have something to do with my decision to create a mobile app.
At the time, I was on regular duty for on-call service and kept receiving alerts at night—or at any other time when I was not sitting at my desktop. Not being able to quickly check an alert’s key details via my smartphone constantly annoyed me—and not being able to react to anything away from my work desk, even more so. This was before 2015. I had tried various existing apps and had not been impressed. I decided to take matters into my own hands by creating an app that would meet the needs of roaming IT monitoring pros.
I do have to confess that when I embarked on the journey towards creating easyNag, I did not have much experience with iOS programming, although I had already built an iOS app by then, to be able to wake up a computer in a local network with an iPhone, iPad, Apple Watch or Apple TV. Starting with a clean state turned out to be extremely rewarding, I learned so much in the process. My biggest hurdle was not having enough time, as I could only work on this on my free time, weekends and nights. Again, loving to code is an obvious prerequisite for anyone undertaking a similar mission.
I launched my app for the first time in 2015, supporting at first only a few IT monitoring solutions. Over the years, the app grew to support major IT monitoring systems, including Centreon. New features and improvements are regularly added, so it’s important to update your version of easyNag!
I constantly have new ideas for evolving the app, and fortunately, I receive a constant stream of feature requests from users, which I always try to implement.
The most important thing is simplifying the on-call service for technicians—after all it was the motivation for building the app in the first place. I would love to hear feedback from the Centreon Community! EasyNag can be downloaded from the App Store and I can be reached at support@easynag.com.
Enjoy your Centreon monitoring on your Apple device and let me know how I can help improve your experience!
Mario
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