Proposal - Community analytics for Drupal

This is also a great idea, technically strong and comprehensive. I like to work on this idea too, I'm interest to developing this, what is the google used in their analytics? Doesn't this be a good model to plot data?

You will need more researched metric then new members, new posts ect - that's obvious data - you don't necessary need a dashboard for. Try to find some more interesting metrics.

I think this is a great idea -- I was already writing something similar for my own site (albeit much simpler at least initially). I for sure will help out on this project either as a mentor or interested community member.

Kyle Mathews

User (mean: admin of his own site) can customize his indicators or not? Example: he installed some modules and want to view performance indicators of them, so he can set his own dashboard to store and view some components of these modules.

I'm student, and want to implement this idea of yours. But I don't know how to register GSoC and join your group... Can you help me?

I like this idea and I am intrigued as I have been spending time setting up RRDtool systems like cacti and munin lately. Are you proposing to use RRDtool for the storage, or to replicate it's storage with PHP and MySQL?

Also, I am not sure that using Google Charts is the best option for this. Maybe if could be a selectable option with something like FLOT as the default.

I suppose the ultimate here would be to also expose all this data to Views 2 as well. Thoughts?

This project sounds intriguing, and would really help on the Drupal site I maintain. I'm a student applying for GSoC, so how would I get started on the proposal for this project? Should I simply copy over the existing proposal here, or rephrase it in my own words?

After half a year using Drupal as a webmaster, I'm excited to cross over to the development side.

Thanks!

I think it would be very useful to integrate monitoring of a site at the Drupal level into an external RRD based system like Cacti.

It would work like this:

• Use existing machine/web server/database based statistics for underlying O/S, web server and DB monitoring. Eg. Load, memory usage, network traffic, Apache Stats (hits, thread scoreboard, etc). This runs on the physical (or virtual if you're on a VPS) host.
• Create a new 'Drupal' template in Cacti. Such a template would need to be extensible or handle statistics that are extensible. As there can be many Drupal sites on a single web server each site to report on would have to be created as a 'host' in the Cacti system.
• Create a Drupal module (named, 'Stats Dump'?) that returns current statistics as required for use by the Cacti template. Such a script could return stats such as number of users registered, logged in, sessions opened, nodes created (possibly split by node type), comments posted (possibly split by node type), watchdog errors or other log entry numbers, pages rendered, pages retrieved from cache, blocks rendered, etc, etc, etc.

Take an example scenario:

• The host web1.example.com is a Linux box running Apache. Standard O/S level and Apache stats stuff is graphed for this box.
• The Drupal sites forum1.example.com, cms2.eg.com and site3.etc.com run on this server. They are all configured in the Cacti monitoring system as 'Drupal Sites' and just have Drupal level statistics reported on.

As you can imagine when starting to think about this an 'Stats Dump' module would have to make use of hooks to allow other modules to report their statistic name and value. If used with Cacti such a module would be called every 5 minutes or so.

The point is that there are a few RRD based tools for statistics collection and display about - we wouldn't want to rebuild them and focus on just producing stats at a Drupal level for them to record.

Thoughts?