Enjoying MOle, wondering about a couple things...

[Eric Pugh]

Hi all,

I am enjoying using MOle, just a couple thoughts have come to mind as
a new user:

1) bundle Rails into the snitch's /vendor/rails directory. I didn't
on a new PC have rails-1.2.3 installed, and that add a hoop to jump
through. I know people have strong feelings about the "vendor
everything", but harddrive space is cheap.

2) Either have rake setup do all configuration, or just have people do
it by hand, since you have to edit the database.yml file anyway! Has
anyone done any kind of webservices approach? In production
deployment, it may be hard to have my local snitch make a direct
connection to the production database due to firewalls etc, not sure
though....

3) Specify that you need to use UTC timestamps:
# Make Active Record use UTC-base instead of local time
config.active_record.default_timezone = :utc

I had it using the default, which is local, and so the filters were
all whacked out. Would be nice to make it an option in Snitch.

4) Mole dumps out the configuration parameters on each request:
MOLEABLE_APP --> true
MOLEABLE_APP_NAME --> Default
MOLE_PERF_MAX_TME --> 2

It would be nice just to see it once at startup.

Thanks! I'll probably have some more questions! I see a lot of
potential in this tool!

Eric

[Fernand Galiana]

Hi Eric,

  Thanks for the kind words.

  1) Yeah this is always a tough call but we've decided to go against bundling
      the Snitch with any version of rails as we felt rails is still moving pretty fast,
      and did not want to get locked in.

  2) I am not sure I am following you seems that there is multiple questions ?
      Typically you would install the MOle along with your application behind the
      firewall. This also solves #3 the timestamp issue as it should be on the same
      time base as your app server.

  3) utc is not always the best choice and may not solve the filter issue. Ideally the
      Snitch is installed on the same configuration as your servers. Here we have one
      snitch installed on our staging server and that monitors all production
      applications.

  4) Ah - This is an artifact of running the MOle in dev mode where the configuration is
      reloaded on every requests.

-Fernand

[Eric Pugh]

Another little glitch was getting the the tables created for Mole in
our production database... Had to manually run the rake task, and
muck around with the environment settings.

Sitealyzer (another plugin) on startup does it's database creation/
checking on the fly.....

for anyone else who hits this issue, the full command on the server
was rake mole:install RAILS_ENV=production from the root application
directory.

Cheers,
Eric