[TYPO3-caretaker] Do you use caretaker

[Georg Kuehnberger]

On 30.08.2010 14:47, Thomas Hempel wrote:
> Hi,
>
> as you might know, we'll talk about caretaker at the T3CON10 in
> Frankfurt this year.
> We thought it would be nice to show some numbers during in the talk
> about the usage of caretaker.
> So it would be nice if you could share your experiences with us. Tell us
> for how long you are using caretaker and how many instances you monitor
> with it.
> Any kind of statistical data would be nice to hear. We don't want to
> know any names of course. Plain numbers like "We use caretaker for 6
> months on 2500 instances know, and it saved us a gazillion hours of
> maintanace work". Something like that...
> Thanks in advance,
> Thomas (caretaker devteam)

- Yes we do use caretaker

- We started using Caretaker since it's public appearance (and replaced 
our own TYPO3-specific-monitoring tool with Caretaker)

- We're currently monitoring roughly 50 T3-instances on roughly 20 Servers.

- Purpose-1: EXT-Security
A: "There's a new Security-Announcement about EXT-123. Which instances 
affected and have to be updated/graded?" - "Who knows which instance is 
running EXT ABC in version 123?"

B: "Our Caretaker will tell you."

A: "OK, so we have to updated/grade the red-ones" ;-)


- Purpose-2: Webbased Report for Problem-Analysis
Given: In addition to Nagios with email & SMS alerts for basic PING & 
HTTP(startpage)-Checks & Alerts, Caretaker is also configured with PING, 
HTTP-checks on multiple T3-Instance-Domains and more than one URL per 
Domain & Tests with meaningful Expect-Values"

e.g.

CLIENT: "Our Website is broken - What's Up?"

WE:  "It's not. (Caretaker tells us its still reachable but very slow) 
however: Caretaker's history of the last few month tells us that this 
problem is occurring every day between 12h and 13h, so you/we have 
investigate in this direction."


- Purpose-3: T3-Version Updates & EXT Overview
We've written a small JasperReport, which queries the Caretaker-DB for 
T3-Versions & EXT-Versions, which we can consult in order to decide 
which T3-Instance to update.



- Purpose-4: Performance-Tuning Documentation
Actually we've used Caretaker's history-graphing for http-requests on 
special pages even for documenting the benefit of performance-tuning 
measurements.


hth, regards georg