Status and Metrics

Posted by wfx on October 10, 2011 at 9:42pm

Stanford ITS has a nice Status and Metrics widget to show when their university network is experiencing problems or other related IT services are experiencing an outage.

Is there a Drupal module that already does this or is custom building a module (or making an application independent of Drupal) the way universities solve this particular need?

I'm doing some research before putting the time into a Drupal module. I've learned that often times modules already exist but sometimes they aren't named intuitively so they are easy to miss. I've done many searches for "Dashboard" and "Status and Metrics" for Drupal but because the term is so general I haven't found many solutions. This seems like a fairly common need so I'm probably just not using the right keywords to search.

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Comments

Two approaches

Posted by kevee (not verified) on October 11, 2011 at 2:54am

At Cal State Monterey Bay we take a dual approach to this problem: first, we use selenium and the selenium module for automated and functional testing of systems. We also use Big Brother's monitoring tools. These are setup along with notificiations and SMS messaging to send automated alerts that systems aren't happy.

However, automated systems like these can cause false positives, and we found that setting messages like the ones you describe doesn't make sense for end users. Better to post a well-written alert on a system a few minutes after an alert goes out than let our users see "The website is down stay tuned!"

For the latter, we have a Drupal site that just has an "Alert" content type that asks for start date, expected end date, and a few other key points and allow other sites to subscribe to that information via RSS.

Selenium

Posted by wfx on October 11, 2011 at 9:52pm

A content type for alerts/outages is what we currently use. I thought we might have taken the simplist solution and other places might have a fancier way. (Selenium is neat btw, I'll check that out)
What I had in mind was a manual reporting module which would create an Incident Content Type that shows a different icon per type of incident and displays a table underneath with a pager for multiple entries. Probably just going to make this with Views but wanted to see if there was already an option out there.

http://www.webbfx.net/