This post will describe how the website I recently built for monitoring the statuses for the SimCity servers. As many already know, the SimCity servers has often been disconnecting and reconnecting during game-play. I have already been working on gameservers where latency can have a critical impact on the end-users experience of the game, as the client relies on updates each 500th millisecond from the server. Having any large latency in a system like this would let the users experience lag (and would get annoyed in most cases, as we all hate lag). The monitoring tool I made there was a windows program which communicated over a special protocol designed just for server monitoring. It provided me with information such as user statistics, database activity and other information that could be of my interest. It was all a simple windows desktop application displaying all the information on a diagram: 

Today we download applications all the time. On our smart-phone or a game on our computer. Hundreds of thousands of applications are available at our fingertips as we browse through the Google Play store, App Store or the Microsoft Marketplace. Having a platform providing easy access to applications had a huge impact on the software industry creating new markets we did not know of ten years ago. However, the advantage of having a platform over the cloud giving users easy access to hundreds of thousands of applications also has a downside.