Interested in discussing approaches to monitoring of SIS processing

nardell
Community Participant

I have been intending to add automated monitoring of our institutions SIS processing - which is based on transfers of csv files for terms, accounts, users, courses, sections, enrollments. There are a couple of API endpoints (SIS Imports and SIS Import Errors) that provide a wealth of info. Currently working on turning the Python scripts I am developed into a Xymon extension. The scripts currently look at the start and end times of processing to make sure the processing is occurring on schedule and completing within a defined maximum duration. Scripts also look at counts of records processed from courses, enrollments, sections, etc, to make sure count of records processed is within expected numbers. The code which looks at errors/ warnings in processing makes decisions about when to ignore error messages - we typically get batches of enrollment errors related to some of the independent study courses, since their underlying schedule information is prone to change (cancellations in particular). I anticipate new error-catching conditions will need to be added to the scripts, as new kinds errors come to  our attention, so I am writing the code which detects error cases as simple methods in classes that can "chain" together, following a design pattern that is inspired by (but not quite) the GoF Chain of Responsibility pattern. The benefit is new pieces of error handling logic can be added to the chain without having to "splice into" a big hair-ball of conditional logic. Each piece of logic is stand-alone and does not affect other parts of the chain. 

I am sure others have done similar work already, and would benefit from sharing ideas.

Regards

Michael