README file for the Production check & Production monitor Drupal modules. Introduction ============ When bringing a site live, you should double check a lot of settings, like the error logging, site e-mail, disabling the Devel module and so on. Next to that, you should ensure that all SEO modules are installed and properly configured (like Google Analytics, Page Title, XML Sitemap etc.). The Production check module will do all of this checking for you and present the results in a convenient status page accessible through /admin/reports/prod-check. Through this status page, you can easily navigate to all the settings pages or the project pages of the missing modules to rectify all you need to. It would of course also be nice that these settings remain as you set them up. In some cases, when multiple developers make updates to a live site or with the odd client having somehow gotten superadmin access, stuff can get changed, usually unintended. That's where the Production monitor comes in the picture. You can open up the Production check's XMLRPC interface through its settings page and have the Production monitor module connect to it from a 'local' monitoring site in your development environment. This will allow you to monitor all your sites from a central server and keep an eye on them. When adding a site using Production monitor, you can indicate what exactly needs to be monitored for this site. Updates can be requested manually and are fetched automatically each cron run. "But I like Nagios to monitor my sites!" If you prefer Nagios monitoring, you can open up Production check's Nagios integration from its settings page. You can specify what exactly you want to monitor there. You will obviousely need to install the Nagios module to make this functionality work. Remote module update status monitoring ====================================== Since Production check recommends to turn of the Update module, we have integrated its functionality in both Production check and Production monitor. Production check can be configured to allow to transfer its module list with versioning information once a week at a given time. Production monitor can be configured to download this data along with all the rest. It will then, upon your request (still need to add this on cron, but it's a heavy operation, thinking about the best way to do this: the boost crawler code makes a good candidate), check for module updates locally for the remote site. Production check and Production monitor have the necessary code embedded so you will never need to activate the Update module, not even on the monitor site! Performance monitoring ====================== If you install the performance module on a production site, you can use Production monitor to remotely monitor the collected performance data. A new subtab will be available displaying the module data in some nice Google charts. Be sure to activate the fetching of performance data in the site's config! Dependencies ============ - Nagios http://drupal.org/project/nagios There are no true dependencies defined in the .info file, but naturally you need to install the Nagios module if you would like to integrate Production check with your Nagios monitoring setup. - Performance logging http://drupal.org/project/performance Again, no true dependencies defined, but if you want remote performance logging, this module can provide it for you! Install it on the remote site and enable the fetching of it's data when adding a site to Production monitor. Development =========== See prod_check.api.php Installation ============ Production check ---------------- 1. Extract the prod_check module and place it in /sites/all/modules/contrib 2. Remove the 'prod_monitor' folder and all it's contents 3. Upload the prod_check folder to the websites you wish to check / monitor, enable the module and adjust it's settings using /admin/config/system/prod-check. 4. You can check the /admin/reports/status page to verify if the Production check setup described above was executed correctly and no errors / warnings are reported. 5. You can find the result of the Production check module on /admin/reports/prod-check Production monitor ------------------ 1. Grab the prod_monitor folder from the package and upload it to your 'monitoring site' and activate the module. 2. Make sure that the site you wish to monitor is running the prod_check module 3. Navigate to the prod_check settings page and activate XMLRPC and add an API key to 'secure' the connection. The key is limited to 128 characters. 4. Add the site to the Production monitor overview page on /admin/reports/prod-monitor 5. Enter the url and the API key and hit 'Get settings'. All available checks are now retrieved from the remote site. You can uncheck those that you do not wish to monitor. 6. If you wish to fetch the data immediately, check the appropriate box and save the settings. Good to go! Upgrading --------- When upgrading Production monitor to a newer version, always run update.php to verify if there are database or other updates that need to be applied! When ignoring this step, you might get errors and/or strange behavior! Nagios ------ 1. Download and install the Nagios module from http://drupal.org/project/nagios as per its readme instructions 2. Enable Nagios support in the prod_check module on /admin/settings/prod-check by ticking the appropriate box. 3. Untick the checboxes for those items you do not whish to be monitored by Nagios. 4. Save the settings and you're good to go! Performance logging ------------------- 1. Download and install the Nagios module from http://drupal.org/project/performance as per its readme instructions 2. Enable fetching of performance data on /admin/reports/prod-monitor when adding or editing a site. Drush ----- You can view the Production Check statuspage using Drush, simply by using this command: $ drush prod-check or its alias: $ drush pchk A colour coded table will be printed. The information is limited to the name of the check and the status. In the Drupal version of the status page, you have an extra line explaining more about the curent status of a specific check. You can easily make your site 'production ready' by using the following command: $ drush prod-check-prodmode or its alias: $ drush pchk-pmode This will fix most of the problems reported in the status page. You can have some extra control on the process by adding the --config option: $ drush pchk-pmode --config This will ask for some input before setting up the site. For Production monitor, these commands are available: $ drush prod-monitor [id] $ drush prod-monitor-fetch [id] $ drush prod-monitor-flush [id] $ drush prod-monitor-delete [id] $ drush prod-monitor-updates [id] (--check) or their aliases: $ drush pmon [id] $ drush pmon-fe [id] $ drush pmon-fl [id] $ drush pmon-rm [id] $ drush pmon-up [id] (--check) The id parameter is optional for the prod-monitor command. The best usage is to first get a list of sites: $ drush pmon Now look up the id of a site, then use the other commands to act on that specific site by passing it the id: $ drush pmon 3 $ drush pmon-fl 3 You can pass multiple ID's by separating them with spaces: $ drush pmon 3 6 19 $ drush pmon-fl 19 4 1 The prod-monitor-updates command acts on one id only! APC --- Production Check complains about APC not being installed or misconfigured. What is APC you wonder? Well, APC is an opcode caching mechanism that will pre-com- pile PHP files and keep them stored in memory. The full manual can be found here: http://php.net/manual/en/book.apc.php . For Drupal sites, it is important to tune APC in order to achieve maximum per- formance there. Drupal uses a massive amount of files and therefore you should assign a proper amount of RAM to APC. For a dedicated setup 64Mb should be sufficient, in shared setups, you should easily double that! To tune your setup, you can use the aforementioned hidden link provided by Production check. You can see the memory usage there, verify your settings and much more. To help you out even further, an APC config file can be found in docs/apc.ini.txt. You must obviousely rename this file and omit the .txt extension (drupal.org CVS did not seem to accept files with .ini extension?). Note: This 'hidden link' makes use of the APC supplied PHP code and is subject to the PHP license: http://www.php.net/license/3_01.txt . Updates ======= When new checks are added to the prod_check module, the prod_monitor module will automatically fetch them from the remote server when you edit the settings. Upon displaying the edit form, XMLRPC is ALWAYS used to build op the checkboxes array so that you always have the latest options available. Cron is NOT used to do this, since we want to keep the transfer to a minimum. Hidden link =========== Production check adds a 'hidden link' to the site where you can check the APC status of your site. This page can be found on /admin/reports/status/apc. This is in analogy with the system module that adds these 'hidden pages': /admin/reports/status/php /admin/reports/status/sql Truely unmissable when setting up your site on a production server to check if all is well! The detailed report page ======================== The page is divided into 4 sections: - Settings: checks various Drupal settings - Server: checks that are 'outside of Drupal' such as APC and wether or not you have removed the release note files from the root. - Performance: checks relevant to the performance settings in Drupal such as page / block caching. - Modules: checks if certain modules are on / off - SEO: performs very basic SEO checks such as 'is Google Analytics activated and did you provide a GA account number. The sections might shift over time (maybe some stuff should go under a 'Security' section etc.). The checks itself should be self explanatory to Drupal developers, so they won't be described in detail here. Support ======= For support requests, bug reports, and feature requests, please us the issue cue of Menu Clone on http://drupal.org/project/issues/prod_check. Thanks ====== kbahey (http://drupal.org/user/4063) for making the performance logging integration possible! bocaj (http://drupal.org/user/582042) for all the great contributions!