Monitoring your Amazon EC2 Cloud can mean the difference between a lean and always running website with proper images and videos and a site that constantly falters and stays down because of a lack of monitoring and rebooting. With Decaf users are able to navigate their system setup, monitor usage and overall performance and ultimately receive SMS alerts when issues occur.
Keep reading for more information and to examine several screenshots from the Decaf Application.
Decaf is simple to use, the main screen (dashboard) on the application features several touchscreen based options including "running instances, EBS volumes, Elastic IP, Key Pair, AMI, EBS Snapshot and Security group. These instances even show the number of running processes currently being implemented on your cloud setup.
Under "instances" the program allows administrators to then monitor their system, even rebooting their setup as necessary from a simple onscreen option, while also terminating the processes and accessing other one button admin options. While you won't gain full control over your EC2 account, the main functions needed during server issues are available.
You'll also notice that for each "instance" there are several different colored spheres, these each serve a different purpose, according to the Decaf webite: "Green shows you your instance is running smoothly, red says to you; something is wrong, take a closer look and the grey bean is telling you that the instance is gone from amazon."
Finally the program includes a simple to access homescreen widget, this makes it simple to click one icon in order to launch your monitoring application. From that application users can easily monitor CPU consumption, disk usage and network use. This is again a simple screen, however it can be useful for spikes in site use or for determining downtimes.
Whether you need to monitor your account, fire up new instances or close currently running parts of your system, you can do it all with the Decaf application for Google Android. Since I don't have an EC2 account of my own I was only able to try the application on a friends setup for a short period of time. What I can tell you is that during that limited time period the program made use Amazon EC2 one of the most simple parts of server management I have seen to date.
If you're fanatical about monitoring and managing your Amazon EC2 account I would highly recommend that you take a closer look at Decaf.
Download a Decaf trial here.