[Koha-devel] Koha Command and Control

dcook at prosentient.com.au dcook at prosentient.com.au
Thu Dec 17 00:16:02 CET 2020


Hi Cab,

I was thinking a bit about how there is no point re-inventing the wheel. I've never heard of New Relic, but that reminds me about Prometheus (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Prometheus_(software)).

I could write a Koha plugin to create an "exporter" for Prometheus.  Or even use something like https://github.com/fstab/grok_exporter to read Zebra logs. I think that would handle the data collection aspect in a more standardized way than I was originally thinking. 

I know many people would say that monitoring isn't part of the application, but a lot of applications these days have Prometheus exporters out of the box.

Hmm food for thought. 

As for the command aspect, an Admin API is the way to go with that. And if something can't be handled by the API, perhaps we should re-think how it's done. (Containers help with this. For instance, instead of updating a configuration file and restarting Apache, you would actually commit a change, use a deployment pipeline, and the container(s) would ultimately be replaced via automation.)  

Anyway, thanks for indulging me heh.

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

-----Original Message-----
From: Koha-devel <koha-devel-bounces at lists.koha-community.org> On Behalf Of Cab Vinton
Sent: Thursday, 17 December 2020 2:02 AM
To: Koha Devel <koha-devel at lists.koha-community.org>
Subject: Re: [Koha-devel] Koha Command and Control

This popped into my email ... Above my pay grade, but maybe of relevance?

https://newrelic.com/

All best,

Cab Vinton, Director
Plaistow Public Library

On Tue, Dec 15, 2020 at 6:04 PM <dcook at prosentient.com.au> wrote:
>
> 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
>
>
>
> _______________________________________________
> Koha-devel mailing list
> Koha-devel at lists.koha-community.org
> https://lists.koha-community.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/koha-devel
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