Just enough monitoring to ensure the health of the product. It shouldn’t be a replacement for SNMP or WMI. Requirements of such a system are
- Real time monitoring of critical subsystems.
- Simple and few number of interfaces for effective monitoring. (not SNMP or native monitoring and management agent)
- Notify the user using device notification, SMS or email.
- Extensible API for plugging in future products.
- Interfaces for registering other products.
Architecture considerations
Embeddable monitoring agents where each products ships with its own agent. One of the advantages with this approach is not having to maintain any sort of dependencies with the monitoring agent itself. Users can register their devices with the monitoring agents. There are a few disadvantages with this model.
- Not all organisations allow personal devices to be connected to the office network
- Monitoring will be limited to the time the device is connected to the network which will make it not very useful.
Ideally we should be able to deliver notifications to the device directly through cell network. Since Apple allows only their Apple Push Notifications Service to be delivered messages like this and they expect each applications to register with the APN, we may have to have a central notification server which can aggregate messages from our customer premises and then forward them to Apple Push notification service. An aggregation server will have to perform necessary authentication and authorisation to ensure that the users requesting for the notification are indeed allowed to receive messages. Organization Application monitoring app on the device can perform these operations before registering with APN.
