Managing Game Servers from My Phone with AMP

I run a few Minecraft servers for friends — Adventure Bros, Hollowpoint, Holocraft. They're managed through CubeCo AMP (Application Management Panel), which is a solid self-hosted game server platform. AMP has a web UI, but I wanted the same phone-first experience I built for my homelab services. So rather than make a whole new app, I added a second tab to Galaxy Lab.

What AMP Gives You

AMP runs each game server as an instance under a controller node, and it exposes a REST API for everything. Each running instance reports real-time metrics: CPU usage, memory usage against a configured limit, and active player count. You can also start, stop, and restart instances through the API — which is exactly what I needed.

The Game Servers Tab

The new tab authenticates against the AMP API on load, pulls the full instance list, and auto-refreshes every 10 seconds — tighter than the 30-second interval on the services dashboard, since game server state changes a lot faster than whether Grafana is reachable.

Each server card shows the instance name, game type, and current state (Running, Stopped, Starting, etc.). While a server is running you get live metric bars for CPU, memory, and player count, color-coded from green to yellow to red as load climbs. Disk usage shows up underneath. At the bottom of each card are action buttons — Start when the server is stopped, Restart and Stop when it's running — with a spinner while the action is in flight. If the AMP session expires in the background, the app re-authenticates silently before retrying.

Getting It Reachable

The AMP management panel runs on a private IP, so to reach it from my phone without a VPN I routed it through the same Traefik setup that fronts everything else in the lab. The one detail: the DNS entry needed to be set to grey cloud in Cloudflare (DNS-only, no proxy) so API calls from the app get through cleanly. AMP handles its own authentication, so no additional auth layer was needed on top.

What's Next

This is a solid v1. On the list for future improvements: push notifications when a server goes down unexpectedly, a view of who's currently online, and maybe a peek at server console output for quick diagnostics. For now though, having live metrics and one-tap controls in my pocket has been a genuine quality-of-life improvement — especially when a friend messages asking why the server is down.