Meows: monitoring and managing Linux servers from Android over SSH
Posted here as a one-off in General with permission from AnthonySmith.
I'm the developer of Meows. I wanted to check and manage my Linux servers from Android using the SSH access I already had, without installing a monitoring daemon on each VPS.
The Android device opens the SSH connection itself, either directly or through a bastion host you configure. There is no Meows relay in the connection path and no extra management port to expose.
Earlier compatibility work benefited from system reports shared by people on LowEndTalk, including OpenVZ, LXC, Alpine, ARM and older-kernel environments. Those reports helped me improve metric collection beyond the systems I could test myself.
The dashboard shows CPU, memory, disk, network, uptime and connection status. You can view the last 1, 2 or 5 minutes of history and check related processes, mount points or network interfaces where the data is available. While monitoring is running on your Android device, Meows can notify you about resource-usage thresholds and SSH disconnections or reconnections.
The screenshots were taken on a Pixel 5 in Dark mode. You can select Dark under Settings → Theme Mode. Meows uses Android's system color palette, so switching to Dark does not necessarily reproduce the same warm colors on every phone.
There is an interactive SSH terminal, along with Docker container controls and live logs. Docker operations use SSH and the permissions of that account, so you do not need to expose the Docker remote API. Local and remote SSH tunnels are supported too.
Meows Lens lets you work with text in terminal output and Docker logs. For example, you can select a domain and choose DNS A to look up its addresses, as shown below. WHOIS and TLS certificate queries are available as well. Recognizing text does not execute a command on its own.
SSH credentials are encrypted on the Android device with AES-GCM, with keys managed by Android Keystore. Meows has no analytics, telemetry or advertising SDKs, and no Meows backend receives monitoring data. Optional Google Drive backups are encrypted on the device before being uploaded.
Meows requires Android 14 or newer. It is a US$4.99 one-time purchase on Google Play, with no subscription, ads or in-app purchases. Local pricing and availability are shown by Google Play.
Questions about how it works are welcome. If a metric looks wrong on one of your systems, the distro, architecture and a screenshot would help me investigate. Please remove credentials and other sensitive details before sharing.