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The iPhone App for Zenoss – That’d be KyK

The iPhone App for Zenoss – That’d be KyK then

Andy Flisher is a Software Developer based in the North East of England specialising in cross platform development. Mobile Development experience includes Windows Phone, Android, and iPhone Apps. Desktop Software Development includes bespoke Windows, Linux, and Mac Applications. Web Development Skills include PHP, Perl, Python, ASP (Classic and .NET) – Andy Flisher on Google+

Zenoss is a monitoring system, we use it the office, and basically it sits on one of our servers out in the Cloud (the Internet to most people) and regularly monitors our kit, servers, and our clients kit too, to make sure they’re still up and doing what they should. If something disappears, a disk gets full, or a server overloaded it alerts our Engineering team and we swoop into action. When there’s an alert it keeps on alerting until you respond and acknowledge it – that’s where KyK comes in.

KyK?– It’s from the Afrikaans for ‘Watching’ – which is the easiest way to explain what Zenoss does.

Yes, yes, very clever – but what is it? Well, it’s an iPhone App, an iPhone client for Zenoss if you will, although not just iPhone, it will work on any handheld iOS device, so that’s the iPod Touch and the iPad – Oh, and I wrote it, I’m an App Developer too you know, so that’s Web Based Software, Desktop Software, and Mobile Software – clever me 🙂

Back to the top, when there’s an alert in Zenoss you have to get on line, login, see the agent and acknowledge it. Alerts don’t happen at convenient times, so KyK is aimed at making it easier. Fire up the App, it automatically polls your Zenoss server and lists any events. New events are highlighted at the top, tap, confirm, acknowledged – that simple, convenient, mobile. You can also view more detail and alert history for events too if you want.

What’s next? Well KyK (and KyK Lite – a free version that lets you see events but not acknowledge them) is out there now in the Apple iOS App Store, there’s a version for Android in Beta (that basically means half done and in testing) and it may expand beyond that, I have half an idea for an enhanced iPad / Tablet version with a lot more management features, but we’ll have to canvas demand to justify developing that.

How’s KyK doing, setting the Zenoss Community on fire? Not yet, but it’s only been out for a few weeks, we have customers in Mexico, Canada, the US, South Africa, and of course the UK – it’s interesting being global – but also a challenge. I deliberately wrote a support / feedback mechanism into the app so users can contact us as easily as possible, it’ll also send me useful debug logs so I can understand what has and hasn’t happened, so that makes life easier, but of course we have timezones and languages to deal with, thankfully most people internationally speak better English than we do. Today I’ve released version 1.1 which fixes a couple of minor bugs and user interface anomalies, and massively adds support for Zenoss 4 and above (Annoyingly Zenoss 4 came out of Beta whilst KyK was in the worlds longest App Review, so we had no opportunity to test and ensure compatibility before release), and have a few features to add for the next release. The big milestone will be 1.2 when it’ll go live for Android too, just need a Tardis and a few round-too-it’s and we’ll be there.

Bigger plans, commercially, we’d like to talk to Zenoss themselves, or their clients, KyK is written in such a way that it could easily be re-branded, or custom re-written as an Enterprise App to be deployed large scale – but that sounds a lot like Marketing, which is for another day and the right frame of mind, step 1 (and 1.1) complete.

In the meantime if you use Zenoss, or know someone that does, and have an iPhone in your hands, buy KyK for Zenoss on the iPhone, leave a nice review (if you can), and make me smile, thus justifying a lot of long hours and thought!

Andy works for dotUK (www.dotuk.net) a North Based Web and Software Development firm he helped found.