Keeping The Lights On - Operations and Monitoring Best Practices

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So, you've built and launched the most awesome Drupal site ever? Once the launch party is over, the operations hangover sets in. This session will be focused on practical tools and techniques you can use to keep "your fingers on the pulse" of your site, from availability to performance to security. While this is intended for intermediate Drupal developer and administrators, we'll have tips and tricks that even experts will find interesting!
  • Learn about site issues and outages before your customers do!
  • Know about critical issues without completely destroying your personal life.
  • Centralize and analyze your Drupal and web server logs.
  • Use the Nagios module to monitor tens or hundreds of Drupal sites.
  • Track and manage to SLAs (even if you aren't required to).
  • Use security tools and services to detect and respond to vulnerabilities.
  • Manage core and contrib software versions, updates, and patches.
  • Maintain ongoing compliance with security standards (like PCI DSS).

Speakers

Time slot: 
Wednesday 5:00pm-6:00pm
Room: 
Drupalize.me Room 405
Track: 
Site building
Experience level: 
Intermediate
Questions answered by this session: 
Why is it important to monitor my site?
What tools are available to me to do that job better and more easily?
What tools can help with day-to-day management of content and users on my site?
What external standards might impact my operations needs?
How can I effectively scale these practices from one site to dozens or hundreds?

Comments

I'm sure you guys are a shoo-in for final selection even without a lot of "I totally want to see this session" ratings, but ... I totally want to see this. ;-)

That said, I'm sure the "ratings" help organizers plan which rooms to use for which sessions and help avoid time collisions between topics that are popular with the same sub-set of the community, so I do hope people won't be too complacent about "voting", even when they are sure a proposed session is going to be scheduled.

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  $full_name = 'Lowell Montgomery';
  $from = 'US/British dual citizen living in Germany';
  $blog = 'drupal.cocomore.com/blog';
  $drupal_interests = array('evangelism',
   'building cool sites', 'coding', 'design', 'UX');
?>

Submitted by LoMo on Mon, 2011-11-14 13:57

Very interesting presentation. We run a lot of Drupal sites and it's kind of hard to keeping the lights on, not only in terms of availability, but in terms of module updates, performance issues - all aspects you mentioned. Manual checklists and lot's of Drupal experience are still one of the best tools. Thanks for mentioning our product http://www.drupalmonitor.com - a Drupal monitoring solution we are now working on.
Greggles mentioned, there is no pricing. Yes, we haven't implemented a pricing model yet. We are still in beta. However, we already monitor a lot of sites free of charge. We give away the tool for free (or better say in exchange of user feedback to improve the service).
We've created a 3min walktrought about how drupalmonitor works. You can find it on the frontpage. We are a team of 3 people working on the product right now. You are very welcome to join, feedback and help to build the solution.

Submitted by lukas.fischer on Sun, 2012-03-25 12:50

Hi, Great presentation! Is there a slide show for this? I'd like to get the audit check list in pdf.

thanks again!

Submitted by jleuthard on Tue, 2012-03-27 18:16
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