[Koha-devel] Koha Command and Control

[dcook at prosentient.com.au]

Hi all,

 

For a while, I've been thinking that it might be good to have an open source
"Koha Command and Control" for managing Koha instances. 

 

While managing 1 Koha is not too much work, it's considerably more difficult
to manage 10, 100, or 1000 Koha instances, especially across different
servers, geographic locations, timezones, etc. 

 

I am sure that most vendors have mechanisms in place for checking the system
preference values for all their instances (I have scripts for this sort of
thing), what about tracking Zebra queries that contain syntax errors (bug
27139)? 

 

I know that we have HEA for sharing a lot of data, but there is some data
(like search queries) that I don't think most libraries would want to share
with the community. But Koha administrators, especially vendors with a large
number of Koha instances, want to know when problems arise. 

 

I suppose that a person could just implement log file scanning for Zebra,
but I was thinking about something more structured, which could be analyzed
to provide data quality control. My thought is that we'd configure Koha to
push events to the "Koha Command and Control" (which would be configured by
the Koha system administrator - not librarian level). If Zebra logs a 'ZOOM
error 10014 "CCL parsing error"', we probably want to tell the Koha user
that we found no search results (nice user experience), but we want to flag
with a Koha administrator that there is a problem. If Koha administrators
(e.g. Koha vendors) start receiving a lot of these errors via the Koha CnC
(Command and Control), they're better placed to raise Bugzilla reports/write
patches. 

 

Anyway, it's just an idea. Probably too ambitious. But I think that it would
be wise for us to start thinking more about the *data* generated by Koha and
how we can use that data to improve Koha. I don't think we need machine
learning algorithms to do the data analysis (yet), but I think having
automated data collection, organisation, and reporting would be useful. 

 

I have to run but I'll keep thinking about it. I know I have more grand
ideas than I have time, but I could put some thought into what a system
might look like, and maybe throw something together locally first before
suggesting anyone else get on board.

 

David Cook

Software Engineer

Prosentient Systems

Suite 7.03

6a Glen St

Milsons Point NSW 2061

Australia

 

Office: 02 9212 0899

Online: 02 8005 0595

 

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