Recently I was hiking with couple of friends – one of them runs IT operations for a large consumer company. He was on call that weekend, so, sure enough, his phone rang: it was the customer service coordinator who was saying that her team was not able to access the application. My friend had to run back to the car to power up his laptop, connect to the VPN using his wireless card, check status of his Tomcat servers and jump on a bridge call. My other friend was busy tweeting and doing a foursquare check-in of his location (I think becoming mayor of a remote mountain in Colorado counts for something :)).
So, to help Tomcat admins who might not always be at their computer during on-call weekends, we just announced a TomcatStats for iPhone, the world’s first iPhone app for managing Apache Tomcat. Using TomcatStats, you can check if the Tomcat instances are running or not, if the applications on those servers are up or not and also get details about memory usage, connections etc.
If you use Tcat Server with TomcatStats, things get even better – you can view server.xml, so you can check if the configuration on that particular server is what it should be, and if necessary you can restart that Tomcat instance directly from your phone.
Here is a preview of the app:
As you see at the bottom of the image, you can manage either “plain vanilla” Tomcat instances or Tcat Server instances. To start managing a Tomcat instance, all you need to do is to enter the server URL and the user id/password for the manager application. (If you haven’t turned on the manager app, you can do so by editing tomcat-users.xml file in conf directory).
To see screenshots and get started, click here.
If you use an iPhone and manage Tomcat in your organization, TomcatStats is an app that you want to have. Download it, give us feedback and tell us what more you would like to see added to the app. Best of all, this app is FREE.
If you haven’t downloaded Tcat Server, download it here and get the enterprise capabilities you need for your Tomcat environment.
