Definition

It is extremely flexible, easy to set up and does not take much system resources. 

Presenting "a bird's eye view" of the monitored applications, it gives a clear picture of the app's health for both Developers and Managers, predicting any possible or upcoming problem.

Why would you need MoSKito-Control?

The standalone MoSKito-Essential provides everything needed for monitoring and error digging, still, there are use cases which go beyond that. A possible scenario is when you have multiple monitored instances of your app and want to know how the farm is doing. This is exactly what MoSKito-Control is made for.

From a practical point of view, MoSKito-Control is an application (with web and mobile interfaces) that gets connected to multiple standalone MoSKito instances and creates an overview display of the whole application and its health. This is a kind of application you want to run on a TV in your CommandCenter.

Features 

Full control at a glance

In ideal world, you have a monitoring console to show the vital signs of your application.

You may find such a console if you sneak into IT-department room of a large IT-company. They usually have a TV on the wall to monitor what they find the most important. This may be the number of new/resolved issues they are dealing with, or state of network connection throughout the company, or the current football game score.

MoSKito-Control helps making a step towards ideal state of things, offering such a TV on your machine!

It shows the health of your app's components, displays how the health states changed over time, generates charts for better visualisation, allows fast and convenient sorting. These are the basic things that make monitoring convenient and effective. 

Controls for essential operations

Below are just a few examples of what you may do in MoSKito-Control with a click or two:

• switch between the apps you monitor,
• show groups of components within your web app,
• filter components according to their health state (for example, display only the healthy or the bad ones),
• build charts to visualise your app's performance,
• view how the health of your app changed since you started it,
• and many other things we're planning to add soon! 

Combined charts for multiple nodes

To know how parts of your application are doing, you often try to compare their efficiency.

In MoSKito-Control, you may see performance of multiple nodes on one chart. That will clearly display when one part worked worse than the other and how long did it last. Having this info, you're on the right track to fix problems and improve effectiveness of your app. 

Entire change history

There are times when the history of your app's performance stops being a boring set of figures and turns into the most valuable source of info. 

For example, to judge about the stability of an app's component, when you need to know how frequently it jumps off the normal state and returns back (if it does). Or, maybe you just need to know exactly when the component went offline and then back to function, and how long did that downtime lasted?

MoSKito-Control history shows all the status changes for all components, with the most precise timestamp (with milliseconds). 

Muting

When you deploy to production server, you usually receive tons of notifications about application failures - of course, in case you do monitoring.

For you, those messages are irritating and you instantly press the Delete button when seeing them in inbox. While deleting, you may accidentally remove something worth your attention.

For your boss, the failure notifications are a sign you're not doing the work you're paid for. Surely, you will explain everything later. Still, avoiding this situation at all would be the best option for everyone.

That's what Mute functionality is made for. You switch on muting for an hour and that's enough for you to update your app, skipping alerts and notifications. 

iPhone App

Having an iPhone version for monitoring solution is simply a must.

With MoSKito-Control App, you may be away having barbeque with your family, partying at a disco or travelling over the Great Canyon, and still knowing how your app's doing.

How It Works?

MoSKito Control consists of two parts:

The workflow is simple:

1. Agent fetches your app's performance data from MoSKito-Core, and sends it to WebApp via EndPoints, configured to support certain transfer protocol (currently the HTTP transfer is used). 
2. WebApp receives the data, handles it and displays the processed info through its own user interface.

History and current state

Originally developed as Healthcheck Monitor for the PARSHIP GmbH, it has been contributed back to MoSKito codebase by PARSHIP. 

Right now, MoSKito Control is at the stage of intensive development, with the current version 0.2.
However, MoSKito Control will be located as additional module, out of the MoSKito primary code base on anotheria GitHub account.

The documents below how MSK-Control evolves, day by day.