Monitoring System for Proactive Maintenance of Mobile App Servers

Customer

The Customer is a European IT product company that provides an easy-to-use communication device for senior citizens living independently and an accompanying mobile app for a senior’s device and their relatives’ or helpers’ mobile devices to communicate with the seniors, monitor and manage their daily schedule.

Challenge

The Customer already had a cross-platform mobile application used for the tablet-based communication device for the seniors and mobile devices of their relatives or other helpers with the respective functionality. The Customer wanted to improve application stability and availability by timely addressing application issues before they reach mobile app users. To enable that, the Customer needed to establish a monitoring system to continuously monitor the app servers.

Solution

ScienceSoft’s infrastructure engineer installed and configured Zabbix agents to monitor the Customer’s Linux-based application servers running on Exoscale instances. The engineer enabled monitoring of several groups of parameters, including:

• Server availability (free server disk space, network connection state, etc.).
• Server performance (memory utilization, network bandwidth usage, packet loss, interface error rate, etc.).

Our expert also set template-based graphs and schemes to visualize tracked server parameters.

ScienceSoft’s infrastructure engineer grouped the monitored metrics according to possible issue scenarios (e.g., app availability problems) and configured triggers for each set of metrics to react to unacceptable metrics values. Triggers prompted the monitoring system to show notifications according to issue severity. The notification categories included information, warning, critical and disaster. Once the metrics values reached the point of risk, the Customer received notifications via several communication channels, including email and Telegram, to timely prevent app issues.

Results

The Customer acquired a well-functioning monitoring system to ensure the availability and stable performance of their cross-platform mobile application. Based on server monitoring data, the Customer could proactively identify and resolve arising application issues and advance user experience.

Technologies and Tools

Zabbix, Exoscale Cloud