Server / App Monitoring & Stats? - “Harvest - Keeping an eye on your crop”

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Is there any need for a stats monitoring module in the Roots stack?

Personally I’m part of a developing a medium sized multisite network. I’m using tools such as New Relic to monitor server load and errors. However monitoring across many networks and customising views of particular statistics has become more and more of a pain. But also it’s very costly. I’m now looking to move monitoring to an Open Source platform.

By doing this we could also benefit from aggregating WordPress specific stats i.e. how many transients are in the options table, how many options are loaded on each page load, how many websites a multisite has, how many login attempts etc etc

I’ve also wanted to give something back to the roots community and if it’s something people would be interested in i’d be happy to start looking at some viable options. One of the stats monitors I’m particularly interested in is Statsd

https://github.com/etsy/statsd - This also has a WordPress plugin available for WordPress specific stats and many other modules already available for deeper stats within the community.

With a stats aggregator in place either on the host or dedicated machine you would then be able to create some graphs and visual representation using a service such as Grafana (http://grafana.org/) - Grafana are also currently looking at integrating alerts (email & sms)

Would this be of interest in the Roots community or would this be better as a personal project? Of course I’d be flexible on the name “Harvest” :wink:

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Sounds like a good idea :slightly_smiling:

New Relic (and its ilk) is good for server monitoring and performance, but it’s quite different from a metrics platform.

Once a WP site (or any site) gets big enough, metrics are very important and you don’t hear it talked about enough in the WP community.

I’d suggest starting this as a personal project. Would be good to keep this forum posted and maybe others would help out as well :slightly_smiling:

This also fits in a bit with a long time idea I’ve had of a proper logger for WP. Ideally you could write a low level “events” plugin which would hook into various actions/filters and then let you add “subscribers”. Then you could create a log for subscribe to write a log file, or write a statsd subscriber.

Rails has a concept like this with http://edgeguides.rubyonrails.org/active_support_instrumentation.html. They just instrument the Rails codebase and logs are generated from the subscriber.

See http://api.rubyonrails.org/classes/ActiveSupport/Notifications.html as well.

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