IT service administration apps on the iPhone

Stuff breaks. Usually when I’m nowhere near a computer. These 4 apps help keep me sane:

1. Jaadu Remote Desktop (app store link). Pricey, but the best RDP client of the bunch. This plus the built in iPhone VPN client and I can access all of our Windows based servers.

2. Citrix Receiver (app store link). Only really applicable if you have significant Citrix investment (e.g. Citrix Access Gateway), but this app works great for a quick check on things in our hosted environment.

3. iSSH (app store link). Great SSH client for the iPhone. The private key import function (copy paste pem contents) is critical for using this app with Linux servers on Amazon Web Services.

4. iAWSManager (app store link). This is a fantastic app if you are heavy into Amazon Web Services. There is an amazing amount of functionality packed into it – CloudWatch monitoring graphs, EBS manipulation, security group access, etc. Given the choice, I won’t be launching new EC2 instances from the app because of the screen size, but it is amazing to have the option.