What's new

This blog is all about Drupal and it's related technologies. We cover devops related topics, announce new product improvements and discuss new ideas. Stay tuned.

Drupalmonitor Connector 7.x-1.12 available

We just launched a new version of the Drupalmonitor Connector on Drupal.org. You can download the source code on https://www.drupal.org/project/drupalmonitor.

Frontpage loading time graph

Our latest product improvement is a near to realtime graph which measures the loading time of the frontpage. Drupalmonitor.com polls the site every 5 minutes. Currently in the site report page, you see the stats of the last 20 crawls.

Search your sites

We tweaked the dashboard view. Now it's possible to search for sites. In addition, we added a new "Site name" field for websites. This can be used to better mark the sites for example "www.yoursite.com PRODUCTION" or "www.yoursite.com CLIENT xyz".

Manually refresh your websites status

We added a small but powerful feature. From now on, you can manually refresh your websites status.

Yess, http://drupal.org/project/drupalmonitor

We are happy to announce that the drupalmonitor.com connector module is finally available on http://drupal.org/project/drupalmonitor.

Make Drupal sandbox projects more visible

Drupal project applications make me sad. I thought I was the only one but after reading http://www.leveltendesign.com/blog/ian-whitcomb/whats-wrong-project-appl... I feel even more depressed. I can absolutely understand why it takes "some" time to get code in. Deep code reviews by the community make Drupal secure, robust and powerful. That's what we all want.

Why you should monitor your Drupal site

There are a lot of reasons why you should monitor your Drupal sites.

"Know where the fire is"

When a Drupal site is down, you should immediately receive an alert (sms, email, tweet) so you can react and fix the problem. Especially when you run a lot of Drupal sites, it's hard to manually test the sites. Using a monitoring tool helps you to see if all your sites are "OK" or not, just from one dashboard. Without monitoring, your Drupal portfolio is just a big black hole.

Ongoing Drupal Website Audit

Drupal website audit

As Drupal site owners, site builders and operators we always try to improve security, performance and configuration of our Drupal site(s). This can be done by using checklists. Traditionally this is done manually. We access thel website and check the Drupal status page, and the important configurations. Typical checks include modules update status, check of Drupal core, cache settings, etc.

Why drupalmonitor.com?

Why we started Drupalmonitor.com?

As a Drupal agency (www.netnode.ch) for years, we create a lot of Drupal websites. As a part of a development deal, we also take care of the maintenance of the website. This includes module updates, drupal core update, extend Drupal sites with new client wishes, lead generation monitoring, performance improvements etc.

The best rrdtool tutorials and documentation on the web

 

Using rrdtool is not complex. However, there is a learning curve since the round robin database concept is somewhat different to other databases. There are also a lot of options you need to understand. Directly jump into the rrdtool documentation can be hard. That's why I created this list of rrdtool tutorials.

rrdtool tutorial list

http://oss.oetiker.ch/rrdtool/tut/rrdtutorial.en.html
The best tutorial to get an overview what rrd is all about and how to use it.

Drupal monitoring discussions on the web

 

Recently I browse the web a lot to look for discussions about drupal monitoring, how people are solving it today and what the pros and cons of existings solutions are. Here is an interesting list with some decent discussions:

Drupal performance tricks

 

Website speed is key! Drupal performance can be tricky, especially with a poorly configured Drupal site. I collected a couple of links about this topic:

The best rrdtool tutorials and documentation on the web

 

Using rrdtool is not complex. However, there is a learning curve since the round robin database concept is somewhat different to other databases. There are also a lot of options you need to understand. Directly jump into the rrdtool documentation can be hard. That's why I created this list of rrdtool tutorials.

rrdtool tutorial list

http://oss.oetiker.ch/rrdtool/tut/rrdtutorial.en.html
The best tutorial to get an overview what rrd is all about and how to use it.

Update Drupal with patch files

 

There are several ways to update Drupal. One of the easiest ways is using a patch file. There is not a lot of documentation about that, but here is how it works:

Example: Update Drupal 7.10 to 7.12 using patches

cd /yourdrupalroot
wget http://fuerstnet.de/sites/fuerstnet.de/files/patches/drupal-7.10-to-7.12.patch
patch -p1 --dry-run 

More information can also be found on http://fuerstnet.de/en/drupal-upgrade-easier.

hp sitescope and drupalmonitor.com

 

Is anybody using HP Sitescope for monitoring Drupal websites?

We are looking for a company who is interested to create a sitescope/drupal plugin using our API.

Get in touch - lf@netnode.ch

Drupal 7.15 Patch files

 

Please find here the latest Drupal 7.15 patch files:

Important changes - August 2012

 

During the last weeks and months we learned a lot about how people use drupalmonitor.com, how we need to deal with all the gathered data, how we can keep the performance high, how we can translate plain monitoring data into actionable information. Therefore we reworked a lot of code as well as we redesigned the drupal monitor connector module. Here are the insights:

Meet us at DrupalCon Munich

 

Our core development team is attending the Drupal Conference in Munich. We don't have an official session, but we plan to do a bof session about "drupalmonitor.com". I'll do a 20min presentation about how drupalmonitor.com is built. After that, we are here for questions & answers which hopefully leads into an interesting discussion about the issues of managing Drupal sites.