Question for Jobs management

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maria.pap...@embl.de

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Feb 23, 2024, 8:52:05 AMFeb 23
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Dear colleagues,

 

I would like to ask you how we can get accurate information for the time we have been working with AtoM. I have tried to get this information from "Job Management", but the start and end dates are always the same. Also, we cannot see any other technical actions that have been taken on AtoM, for example, the time for fixing application problems, upgrades.

 

With kind regards,

 

Maria

 

Maria Papanikolaou

Archives and Records Manager

EMBL Archives and Records Management,

Office for Scientific Information Management (OSIM),

 

European Molecular Biology Laboratory
Meyerhofstraße 1
69117 Heidelberg Germany
maria.papanikolaou @embl.de
+49 (0)6221 387-8719
www.embl.org
www.embl.org/archive

 

Dan Gillean

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Feb 23, 2024, 11:40:22 AMFeb 23
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Hi Maria, 

First, the time stamps used in any Jobs report will use the system time as configured in your linux environment, and the timezone configured in AtoM during installation, which can be adjusted in the apps/qubit/config/settings.yml configuration file. For more general information on working with AtoM configuration files, see: 
These times will only be related to jobs that are run - not every process in AtoM is backed by a job, however. Jobs are typically used for long-running operations that might time out in the web browser if they were executed in real time using the browser's resources. Examples of tasks the job scheduler will manage: 
  • CSV and XML imports via the user interface
  • CSV and XML exports via the clipboard
  • DIP ingests from a linked Archivematica instance
  • Archival description move operations
  • Archival description publication updates that affect descendants (e.g. changing a whole fonds to Draft or Published, etc)
  • Background updates to the search index when linked records are changed
  • etc
In terms of gathering information on how you are using AtoM: 

It sounds like what you want is either some user auditing tools, and/or user analytics. Perhaps a combination of the two will give you what you want. AtoM does not exactly support what you want here, but we have some pieces that may help. 

First, there is a basic audit module for archival descriptions that, when enabled, will track which users create and modify descriptions. See: 
When enabled, you can see all the changes a particular user has made via their user profile, all the changes made to a specific archival description via the "View modification history" option that will be added to the More menu, and finally, a User filter will be added to the Description Updates page (which is already a useful way to see what has been created or modified  within a given period of time. 

Additionally, AtoM does have built-in support for Google Analytics and Tag Manager, so if you set up an account and get an analytics key, you can add this to AtoM's footer and Google will generate statistics about page views, viewing time, and more. For more information on setting this up in AtoM, see: 
Consult Google's online documentation to learn more about what Analytics and Tag Manager can offer. 

Next, as a web-based application, everything in AtoM takes place in a web browser - and there are many different web browser plugins that can track time spent on a page, etc. I am not experienced with these and therefore cannot make a specific recommendation, so you will have to do some of your own research - and it will depend on what browser you use, etc. However, a quick search turns up many articles like this one, which lists several free add-ons available for Chrome, as an example: 
As an institution, if tracking this sort of information is important, then you could potentially explore crafting a policy or local agreement among your AtoM-using archivists to install a common browser plugin to collect this information? Just a thought!

And finally, if you have an experienced system administrator maintaining your AtoM installation, the Nginx webserver has its own logs, including access logs, that do collect a fair bit of information. These logs can then be loaded into third-party reporting tools - our team likes to use Grafana for example. You will need to consult the Nginx documentation to learn what logs it collects and where they are stored, and Grafana's documentation (or that of your chosen tool for ingesting the logs) for how to configure it. 

As for info on server maintenance and troubleshooting: 

AtoM has no ability to "see itself" and report on actions taken on the server it is installed on, such as how long an upgrade takes, how long to troubleshoot an issue, etc. Instead, your system administrators will want to look into Ubuntu system monitoring and auditing tools. There are many available, but again, I am an archivist, not a systems administrator, and I cannot recommend which tools you should investigate and try out. There are many out there, however, including many open source ones for Ubuntu!

Cheers, 

Dan Gillean, MAS, MLIS
AtoM Program Manager
Artefactual Systems, Inc.
604-527-2056
@accesstomemory
he / him


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