On Mon, Jul 25, 2011 at 11:03:09AM -0400, Chris Lalancette wrote:
> I still don't understand why this isn't a 20-minute task
-- when you "do
> something", log the action, user, and time to the Events table in an
> after_save hook. We've been talking about wanting this sort of trail for
> months, so I suspect it's more complicated, but I don't understand why.
The problem is collecting the information. Sure, it would be a 20 minute task
to get everything from the rails app, put it in a table, and then wrap UI
around it. But it wouldn't be very interesting.
What's actually interesting is what is happening in the outside world. Things
like when your instances started in the backend clouds, when they stopped or
crashed due to outside influence, etc. This requires integration with the
scheduler to get that stuff, and then put it in the database. It's
still not a huge task, but it needs a bit more munging to make it work.
It sounds to me like there are two separate things going on here.
The first is that we want, for reporting, an audit trail of who launched
what, where, and when.
The second is that we want to be able to do a better job of monitoring
components for their statuses. It sounds to me like this is more useful
for reporting/display purposes than for the audit trail, which I
perceive as being a log of user actions. But perhaps we want the two to
be blended -- "events" that happen, whether they're user-driven or not.
Does this sound accurate?
-- Matt