DrupalCon Los Angeles 2015: Making your logs work for you: Drupal escalation and disaster recovery

This is a hands-on session where we will build a robust, enterprise grade, emergency response framework by example and go from inception to completion. We will create a functional demo using simple tools like the Watchdog to create an emergency escalation and planning process.

Failures and errors happen as part of the development lifecycle but what is important is how you respond before, during and after an event. Guard against regressions within your deployments and decrease the time to identify and resolve performance bottlenecks before they become customer or user issues.

We will take a brief look at emergency management using the Incident command System and how it can be applied to your Drupal sites.

Using Loggly in conjunction with New Relic we will take a look at how the Drupal 7's good old fashioned Watchdog can trigger events that provide us with stack traces, error logs and critical context when debugging or performing a root cause analysis on a bug or problem.

We will also define a basic escalation policy by integrating Loggly and Pagerduty to trigger alerts and response protocols.

And what better way to test everything than to break something? Once we have everything set up we get a look of the system in action. We will create an emergency event in order to trigger the incident and escalation response.

Increase visibility for stakeholders to get a better understanding emergency protocols, improve communication, manage expectations and streamline coordination when an event occurs.

The topics covered will include:

Overview
Logging in Drupal & PHP
History of logging within Drupal from Drupal 4.6 all the way to Drupal 8
PHP Framework Interop Group (PHP Fig)
Proposing a Standards Recommendation (PSR)
PSR-3 : A common interface for logging libraries
Monolog
Chain of responsibility logging pattern
Core concepts
Emergency Management & Planning
Incident planning and policy
Incident command system
Design an incident plan
Debugging and monitoring
Drupal
Watchdog
Composer manager
Monolog module
New Relic
End-to-end transaction stack traces
Application traces
Front-end transactions
Background transactions (drush, cron)
Track key transactions, hooks and modules
Error logging and aggregation
Availability and Error Monitoring
Loggly
Advanced Log aggregation
Analytics
Monitoring
Custom Dashboards
Pagerduty
Increase visibility
Escalation policy
Audit trail
By the end of this session it will be quite apparent why an ounce of prevention will be worth a pound of cure. The preparation and foresight is something the developers who write the code, business owners who commissioned the project and the end users who access your site will greatly appreciate.

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