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ServerUp

Posted Wednesday, March 25th, 2009 at 6:12 am by Android Tapp 0 Comments

User Rating3.33/5

A must have for any Sys Admin, ServerUp allows you to check the status of your network and web servers. Be the first to know your server is down! ServerUp is configurable to check the status as often as you like. 

Price: $2.99, Free, $4.99

When we first started to evaluate ServerUp Android App, there was a trial version and paid version for $4.99. Now there is only a paid version $2.99.

AndroidTapp.com Android App Review:

ServerUp Android App features “On-Demand” server checking options such as Ping, Trace Route, WHOIS lookup, and Logging. For a network/web administrator, instant notification of your server being down is vital. Gripe Alert: our biggest gripe with ServerUp is that it lacks the ability to automatically perform the mentioned features – you must launch the app everytime, WORSE… some features just don’t work (such as the most important feature… a notification alerting you that your server is up or down) kinda ironic!

We got really excited about ServerUp Android App but was immediately let down as the idea is awesome, but the poor execution and the lack of functionality to cost ratio did not justify. Here’s why:

We thoroughly tested the app against several scenarios (to rule out “false-positives” as the developers stated in the description on their website).

We tested against a corporate website AXA Assistance USA, in which we knew would possibly be down for a short time over a weekend because we were changing DNS servers. Dependant on your ISP, changing DNS Servers has mixed results with website availability; as some visitors experience outages and some may not as their ISP may be slower to update DNS so you’ll get the old DNS settings.

We received a “Down-time” alert at 19:20:57 on 2/27/09 and “Uptime – OK” alert at 20:20:59 2/27/09 from existing website monitoring service SiteUpTime.com. So we checked the website on a desktop PC and on the G1 browser… it was down as was expected.  Then opened ServerUp Android App and it show a connection to the website (see time manually checked here). That made us question whether the app worked at all?!? About a week later we needed to reboot the server and decided to give the app another try. It did not alert us that the server was down. (As a matter of fact, we never received any alerts while using the app).

Using the app could be a bit more intuitive; once you enter a host/website, you have to “Long-press” for actions versus simply clicking on the host/website. Lastly, the Ping results are inaccurate as they always lose packets but doesn’t on a PC, WHOIS information does not contain much information and the Trace Route feature just never worked.

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