The MonitorWare Knowledge Base

There’s currently a lot brewing over here. With the release of phpLogCon, I finally got to a stage where we have a decent web front-end that enables us to support admins with troubleshooting right while they look at their log data. Of course, such a system not only deserves careful design, but it requires a knowledge base so that people troubleshooting can find solutions.

If we look at our web sites, one notices there are lots of troubleshooting resources already available. Just have a look at forum.adiscon.com and you see what I mean. This forum not only offers product specific support, but has a number of quite generic discussion forums (covering Windows Events and syslog messages). We also have other troubleshooting databases. Then, each product site (like rsyslog) has its own support forum.

While all of this is great, it does not play well with the idea of the central, one-stop troubleshooting resource we intend to build. So our first step towards this resource is putting the existing resources under a single umbrella and placing them into a single system. That, of course, requires some redesign and won’t be perfect from day one.

The initial step is to consolidate all forums into a single one. My friend Andre is right now doing that. He has set up the new site kb.monitorware.com which in the future will provide all troubleshooting resources in an easy to find way. That site will be highly integrated with phpLogCon, which will be able to pull troubleshooting info from the central repository while looking at the local logs. I am very excited in seeing this become a reality (though I have to admit we are several month away from the ultimated goal).

The knowledge base site is currently in experimental operation and being finalized for production use. I hope to be able to go officially online next week.