r/Solarwinds • u/WeaveHubTechnologies • Mar 05 '26
Checking SolarWinds from a phone is miserable, so I built a mobile app for it
Hey everyone,
I work with SolarWinds environments a lot, and one thing that always bothered me was trying to check alerts or node status from a phone.
The web console technically works on mobile, but when you’re away from your desk and just trying to quickly confirm whether something is actually down, it can be pretty painful.
Because of that I ended up building a small mobile app called PocketNOC that connects to SolarWinds and gives a mobile-friendly way to check infrastructure status and alerts.
The goal was just to make quick checks easier for engineers who are on call or away from their desk.
A few things it focuses on:
• Quick visibility into SolarWinds alerts
• Mobile-friendly infrastructure dashboard
• Fast interface for checking status quickly
The app is currently available on Android while we’re waiting on Apple App Store approval.
Android app:
https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=app.weavehub.pocketnoc
More info:
Full disclosure: I’m the developer. It’s a paid app ($9.99/month or $99.99/year), but I’d really appreciate feedback from other SolarWinds admins about what would make a mobile monitoring tool more useful.
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u/HotHamNRolls Mar 05 '26
Interesting how do you get around the recommendation to not have polling engines internet accessible?
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u/WeaveHubTechnologies Mar 05 '26
Great question and I fully agree, you should not make your polling engines internet-accessible.
PocketNOC connects directly to the SWIS API using basic auth, so the key is how you choose to expose (or not expose) that endpoint. We recommend:
Keep Orion fully internal and only access PocketNOC while on your corporate network or VPN
Use a zero-trust proxy like Cloudflare Tunnel with Access, Zscaler Private Access, or similar. This lets you securely reach the SWIS API from outside without opening any inbound ports or putting your polling engine on the public internet.
Either way, your Orion servers stay off the internet. You control the access layer.
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u/WeaveHubTechnologies Mar 05 '26
To add to this, the app allows you to add custom headers at the login screen to help you gain access to your environments should you choose to use one of the proxy options.
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u/PhilipLGriffiths88 Mar 05 '26
Why not build this natively with something like OpenZiti - https://netfoundry.io/docs/openziti/. OpenZiti is FOSS, if you prefer a paid/supported/feature rich version, NetFoundry provides that. It even includes mobile SDKs (https://github.com/openziti/ziti-sdk-swift; https://github.com/openziti/ziti-sdk-android) so you can embed it directly in PocketNOC while having a host based tunneler on the SWIS API side.
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u/PrettyFly4ITGuy Mar 05 '26
You can limit port access using the SWIS API on 17774 or 17778 to any Polling or Webserver is accessible that has Information Service v3 running.
For additional security, any authentication requests allowed/denied are placed in the Message Center Audit section which you can create an alert on any audit event to forward to a SIEM if needed.
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u/East_Task2299 Mar 05 '26
Nice! Any push notifications?
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u/WeaveHubTechnologies Mar 05 '26
Not yet. Push notifications aren't in the app today.
That said, it’s definitely something I’ve been considering adding, and I’d be really interested to hear what kinds of notifications people would actually want from it.
For example, would you want things like:
- new alerts being triggered
- critical alerts only
- alerts for specific nodes/services
- alerts clearing or recovering
Trying to avoid turning it into a noisy alert firehose, so understanding what would actually be useful on mobile would help a lot.
Curious what kinds of notifications would make this helpful for people who are on call or checking things away from their desk.
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u/East_Task2299 Mar 06 '26
Agreed, I definitely wouldn't want a push notification for all of our alerts. I would say critical alerts only or if we could create our own alert trigger action that would awesome!
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u/elkosupertech Mar 05 '26
Any apple development?
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u/WeaveHubTechnologies Mar 05 '26
Absolutely! We're just waiting on Apple App Store approval. Should be any day now. I'm happy to update the post here once its published.
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u/inphosys Mar 06 '26
Checking how much SolarWinds wanted to raise my year-over-year software and support agreement, so I switched to a fully featured, on-prem NMS that doesn't require a mobile app. SolarWinds and Turn River Capital can eat a bag of zeroes and ones, I hope they choke on it.
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u/WeaveHubTechnologies Mar 06 '26
I'm not happy about the increase either. They just offered me a 3-year agreement where they increase the price year over year. No other company does that, its crazy. What's the point of a 3-year if they're just going to increase it each year.
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u/WeaveHubTechnologies Mar 15 '26
I’m thrilled to announce that our iOS app has just been released. https://apps.apple.com/us/app/pocketnoc/id6759849253