Blog Entry of 2010-Nov-22 in PRTG 8
More Options to use iPhone Push Notifications with PRTG
iPhone Push Notifications are a fast and cost effective way to send alarms from your PRTG server to your iPhone/iPad. Due to Apple’s design of the push notification system we cannot easily implement our own push notification interface into PRTG or iPRTG. The main reason is that each PRTG user runs his own server which would need to sign up and authenticate with Apple’s servers and stay connected to them using a two-way connection (see KB article "Why is there no support for Push Notifications in PRTG and/or iPRTG?"). The whole setup would be quite complex.
Fortunately there are a couple of apps for the iPhone that fill this gap. I already wrote about Prowl last year , which works fine but we heard from a couple of users that had trouble setting up the API calls between their PRTG and the Prowl servers.
Recently I came across two other interesting options:
Boxcar (FREE/Ad supported)
AppStore link This app instantly became my favorite push notification app. It is very simple to install and set up. It is well designed, worked flawlessly in our tests and it even is FREE. The main idea of Boxcar is to watch accounts on social networks (e.g. Twitter, Facebook) for updates which then trigger a notification to your iPhone. But they also implemented the option to use RSS feeds and emails to trigger notifications, too. The email trigger function is perfect for PRTG. After installing the app you must sign up for a Boxcar account. Afterwards you will be given a unique email address on their server. All emails sent to this email address will be forwarded to your iPhone using push. All you have to do in PRTG is to set up an email notification which sends an email to this unique address. Knowledge base article: How to set up Boxcar with PRTG