I know of a handful of applications that are designed to help you administer your infrastructure from a mobile device. I have tried a few but truthfully the last thing I want to do from my Blackberry is actual work. Responding to emails and making phone calls is one thing, but the thought of trying to examine a query plan on a 2-inch by 2-inch screen is just not appealing. At least, not to me. Perhaps this is a result of my having multiple monitors in my cubical for the past six years, going from that much real estate down to a tiny screen is a huge downgrade.
But what about you? The question for this week is: who wants to administer their servers from their phone?
And I do not consider an application that lets me bounce the SQL Agent from my phone to be something that is even worth discussing. To me, at least, administration of my enterprise means more than bouncing a service remotely. But perhaps our shop is more complex than others. The majority of my time is spent either at work or at home, and both of those locations would not require me to use a mobile device to solve an issue at work.
And during those times I actually get to leave the house with my family the absolute last thing I want to do is run sp_who from my Blackberry. It’s bad enough I check the damn thing every five minutes to see if Chief O’Hara is texting me again because he needs help figuring out where he left his car keys.
I didn’t use ’em from home, but I used them from meetings and lunches. It’s nice to be able to fix minor problems without bailing out of a meeting or racing back from lunch, and I don’t always want to drag a laptop and an aircard everywhere I go.
them? which ones do you use or find the most useful?
The best one I’ve used is Rove, formerly Idokorro.
Brent! Thanks for the plug. Rove’s Mobile Admin has been doing this for almost 7 years now and we are pretty partial to it.
This type of software is not meant to replace your dual monitors — we built Mobile Admin to allow system administrators to get into their environment and fix a problem quickly and then get back out again, not to eliminate the need to have a desktop.