AppsAndroid

Uptime Robot App

We first reviewed uptime robot here and the service has already seen changes in the time since then with the launch of a native application for both Android and iOS. After a week of use it appears to be well designed and without any major issues, but with some clear room for improvement, a solid start for a 1.0.0 release. The app works with both free and paid accounts which is encouraging, they could have locked this as a premium feature and chose not to.

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On first run the app asks for login credentials which are saved, you’re then brought to a basic but informative homepage showing you a quick overview of your monitors, total counts for up/down/paused as well as your most recent events, moving to the monitors tab will show you which ones are up/down currently(and in this case remind me that i need to remove some services I took offline permanently months ago) from here you can dive into a specific monitor by selecting it as well as add new ones using the plus sign at the top left, this is unfortunately where we run into the first discrepancies between the app and the web UI, the app can show me what’s happened but not the details of what caused downtime, the web UI shows HTTP codes and other messages based on what response it got back(cloudflare timeouts ect) which can be helpful in identifying the cause of a failure.

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Going to the monitors tab itself provides a quick glimpse at exactly which monitors are down both with color coded indicators, as well as a simple arrow for those with color vision problems, a very good approach to what could be a complex problem. Selecting a specific monitor brings up a detailed chart showing a response time graph over the past 24 hours as well as a list of the latest events, Response time is important information for services that are up but responding slowly to requests and spikes in this can indicate problems(or increased traffic) to a web service that should be looked into. Also with a specific monitor selected we press the small gears top right to make changes to, or even delete an unused monitor completely.

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The last of these primary tabs is marked settings but is a bit… underwhelming, it has accurate information displaying information about your account but could use some updating and might be more useful if and when you can add a second account for people that have them both for work and home. Otherwise it shows your email and plan, an in app purchase to upgrade your plan wouldn’t be an unwelcome feature here as well.

Overall I have what is a very polished 1.0.0 release of an app, I’ve experiences no crashes or unexpected behaviors, and it’s very close to replacing the need for the web UI, some ability to change accounts between work and home would be a welcome addition, as would the ability to add new alert contacts to an account. Some simple additions to indicate the error code that caused downtime would also be welcome when troubleshooting but for a free app and a free(below 50 monitors at 5 minutes each) service this is a fantastic addition. It’s available on both google play and the itunes store.

 

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Daniel Smith

Daniel Smith is a full time IT administrator at a medium sized private business former FRC coach and technology enthusiast.

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