While @ Drupalcamp Montreal I gave a talk on the Network Manager and how it's helping us manage our sites (see screencasts for usage). Right afterwards I (finally) was able to watch someone walk through everything that Aegir provides. I realize that Aegir is more hosting company in a box focused and my project is for things much smaller in scope (some overlap but totally different context of usage). I was wondering though if there might be a way of tying some of the functionality of the network manager into Aegir.
Some features that I think may be of benefit to Aegir:
- Select groupings of sites to monitor per user w/ access to the root Aegir site (site that creates all the other ones)
- Ability to select values to monitor across those sites that you care about (example being: clean URLs being activated). This could also be extended to monitoring what features are installed on different sites as I know there's been discussion of features integration
- Ability to see what modules are turned on / off across all your sites
- Ability to run queries across sites / packages. Example: Remove user x from all these sites.
- Aggregate all Watchdog entries across all sites in your network into one display
Ultimately the Network Manager project (as it exists currently) is all about helping admins make decisions faster and quickly gain access to data across all their sites. It's very light weight but has a road map to beef up the features set going forward which will overlap a bit more w/ Aegir in some areas. If there was interest in having some of the functionality of this project in Aegir I'd develop the overlapping functionality as plugins to the network manager instead of rolling it right in. If not, then I'll keep doin my own thing but figured I'd put a line out there to see if there was any interest :) Very cool system either way.
Comments
i haven't had a chance to look at your screencast yet
here's a response to your bullet points tho. I will have to read up more on NM to grasp what it's actually doing.
The goal of aegir is to automate away any site administration tasks that we can, in a way that makes sense to real people, not just sysadmins. Thus freeing up people's time and allowing them to roll out new releases more easily and so forth.
I'm not exactly certain what you mean by this ? In aegir sites belong to 'Clients' which is a container node type similar to organic groups.
each client can be associated to multiple users and vice versa. We have access permissions that only allows the user to have access to information they should be able to view.
Because features are modules, we already have this information (see below).
Aegir enforces that clean urls need to be enabled and this is configured correctly in Apache for you.
Aegir provides a framework and a mechanism for retrieving information out of your site, one of the things we eventually want to do is
to do our 'stats' hosting feature, which will retrieve some information about your sites (number of users, etc. etc.) and pull it back into the front end where it is displayed in an aggregated form.
We will likely use the flot library to visualize this, but it is not a priority at the moment.
Aegir already does this, which it uses to determine the wether a site can be upgraded to a new platform.
Aegir is designed to abstract what happens on the back end from what the user needs to do on the front end.
So to us it's important to hide away the nitty gritty of what happens in the back end and present it in a manner that you would be able to give to a manager or a client (after configured).
With the example of removing a certain user account, aegir is more likely to support managing of ACL's via something like LDAP and ensure that you have properly working single sign on within your cluster of sites, which would render the point moot.
if you are running more than a handful of sites it is highly highly recommended you use syslog instead of dblog. all the overhead from logging to the database can kill your performance.
Your Clients idea sounds like
Your Clients idea sounds like it maps well w/ the whole "sites that you care about thing" though it's a more physical relationship. NM lets you select only the sites you want to return statistics about. The two examples I gave were more minor ones but as to...
"Aegir provides a framework and a mechanism for retrieving information out of your site, one of the things we eventually want to do is
to do our 'stats' hosting feature, which will retrieve some information about your sites (number of users, etc. etc.) and pull it back into the front end where it is displayed in an aggregated form."
NM allows you to view stats like number of users per role as well as begins a simple framework for defining other values to monitor / map. This is the focus of the project at the moment as we have a more proprietary that does all the one button site creation stuff outlined in aegir (again, more simplistic).
Ex Uno Plures
http://elmsln.org/
http://btopro.com/
http://drupal.psu.edu/
Now, I know this might be a
Now, I know this might be a fork in the discussion, but I for one am interested in an aggregated watchdog, and I know dblog can be a performance killer, but does one have to exclude the other?
The only thing I've found that does syslog aggregation over multiple hosts and presents it neatly in a web interface is http://www.splunk.com/
What are other drupalers using?