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.
No funding in the North East, at least not for websites
I’m a web developer, in the North East, my customers (rightly) want to pay as little as possible, so funding and grants is a popular question. ‘Can I get funding towards my website’, and the answer is, am not allowed to talk about it. It’s like Fight Club, ‘The First rule of Website Funding is …’
Ok slight distortion of the truth, but today have been threatened with suspension from the North East England Service Providers Register (NEESPR – You all know what that is right?) because I used the word ‘funding’ on our website. Apparently it was against the rules and not allowed, ok, it’s been removed, but after much discussion as to why, and what the alternative information we could offer was (there isn’t any) it’s just not allowed. We basically cannot even say that if you are interested in funding we’ll direct you to the correct people, at least not on our website – And there’s no route to feedback how unhelpful this is to the end client, it’s the rules, do it.
Most people have heard of Business Link, and the key phrase is ‘Business Link Funding’, and to be a provider for a project that is funded by Business Link (the funding isn’t actually from Business Link, it’s from a range of fund sources co-ordinated by the Investment Centre) the provider must be listed on the NEESPR (I have been in it’s various guises for about 10 years now), you get vetted, show references, and obey the rules etc (which is why we removed the word funding). The rules state that all we can say is ‘As listed on the North East England Service Providers Register (NEESPR) so I asked if we could link to their site if visitors wanted information on funding, we can, but because the NEESPR don’t provide funding, there is actually no mention of funding their either.
So, what to do? I get that they have to monitor the unscrupulous, but we’ve never even bent the rules on this topic, it’s always frustrated me that I can’t offer clients any real information on web site funding, I can but guess at the eligibility criteria, the funding rates available, all from feedback from previous clients, I’m not really allowed to even guess in a face to face, just direct them to Business Link. This doesn’t help me as if not careful it looks like I’m being dis-interested or not trying to help my clients, when in reality I want to help, I want to make the funding process as informed and as simple as possible, but I can’t. ‘Go talk to Business Link’ as good as it gets, and that’s face to face. Now, I can’t even offer a link to Business Link on our website because we’re honestly not allowed to use the word funding, cannot even allude to whether funding is even available.
There will be no funding on our website. I cannot help but think this is not useful to Joe Public, this is not in their best interest, and it certainly doesn’t help me help my clients 🙁
As of writing a Google UK search for website funding north east returns 466,000 results, mostly my competition. Let’s see if the rules are evenly applied
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+