[okfn-help] OKFN Dashboard

Tue May 31 00:09:33 UTC 2011

On 31 May 2011 04:06, Rufus Pollock <rufus.pollock at okfn.org> wrote:
> Hi Tim,
>
> I see you started a new repo but then discovered we already have a repo here:
>
> <https://bitbucket.org/okfn/okfn-dashboard>

:)

Did you see this comment? http://trac.okfn.org/ticket/713#comment:7

The work that I did last night was mainly just testing out watchdog.
Polling 40+ sites seemed like the easiest way to start.

As it happens, watchdog is excellent. Now that I've seen an
alternative, I feel that cron is not ideal. Manual tweaks would need
to happen every time a service was added or the monitor was moved to a
different host. I would like to be able to make sure that the
monitoring system can be run anywhere.

> As there are several people who have offered to contribute I suggest
> it would be good to try to finalize planning and parcel up the work a
> bit focusing on our existing ticket (and any sub-tickets we can
> create):

+1

Is this mailing list the right forum for that discussion?

> A starting point would be to get a really clear set of use cases (see
> the ones i've already created). We can also avoid duplicating anything
> we've done already (e.g. Nils our sysadmin has already got a list of
> sites and services and nagios monitoring set up at status.okfn.org).

Some cases to think about:

 - an outsider looking to see what OKFN is about
 - having something to show off to people at a monitor
 -

Are any of these use cases that should be included

> I think there are probably a bunch of separate tasks:
>
> * Getting a list of sources
> * Pulling / scraping data from those sources
> * Integrating that data
> * Exporting it as reports and providing front-end web pages
> * We may want an overall mini-webapp though i think, at the start, we
> should aim for just json plus flat html as much as possible :-)

+1

I don't see any reason to provide anything more than static HTML.  If
admins want access to the database, they can use SSH.