July 28th, 2008
Splunk and iPhone
| Topics: | api |
|---|---|
| Tags: | iphone, livetail |
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I’ve been playing with a few things that will eventually turn into an iPhone application to talk to Splunk via the REST API. I don’t have a lot to say about it right now due to other issues but I do have a little something to show off:
Splunk doesn’t support Safari officially yet and MobileSafari is a whole ‘nother animal, but there are other things you can do. You can talk to the REST endpoints just fine. Here I have a Live Tail search running from the browser, talking to my production server.
July 29th, 2008 at 10:21 pm
just as well you have “all you can eat” plans. in the land downunder we live in a time warp and have to pay for every friggin’ MB.
July 29th, 2008 at 10:38 pm
bah, posted to early…
i was about to say most excellent.
I can see it now, while kicking back with a beer at the local pub a manager calls screaming that the sky is falling and the world as we know it world is about to come to an untimely end. I whip out iSplunk and within seconds I can proclaim “it ain’t our platform baby”.
Of course in the real world it is always our platform and the world is already on a knife’s edge…
July 30th, 2008 at 7:18 am
Don’t get me started about telcos. I was in that industry a long time…
I’m starting simple with iPhone, something like what I did with the Dashboard widget. The new stuff in Splunk makes it easier because lots of people have already figured out how to parse Atom RSS feeds and I just have to read what I get back from the endpoint. For me the hard part is Cocoa, as I’m a big unix-head. And for iPhone there isn’t much code out there yet to learn from. I also want to tie it in to the push notification service so in a couple months when that is available I can have something on the Splunk side tell you actual useful information when you need it, without having to open the application and go looking for it.
Designing for mobile devices gives you a lot more constraints, limited resources means you have to really think about what is most important and present it to the user when she needs it, and only when she needs it. iPhone has a huge display by mobile standards, but compared to a normal desktop it’s still pathetically small. And building a usable UI without mouse and keyboard is tough.
I’m not the first to think that handheld system administration from a mobile device would be a good idea. There was even a paper about it. The Palm devices at the time could barely handle the complex UI required for a robust tool but expect to see many more sysadmin tools for iPhone. Even with the license restrictions that are annoying not just Open Source developers, it is still the most accessible mobile platform out there. (I’ll believe Android when I see a production device. And I’ll probably be writing code for that too.)