Metrics Maintenance – Monday 10th April

On monday there will be some scheduled, planned maintenance being performed on some of the core Metrics backend. For most of you it shouldn’t cause much inconvenience, but so that you know what’s going on, and in the interests of being as open about the system as possible, let me tell you what’s going to happen and why…

What’s Going to Happen

  • At 10am PDT on Monday, Metrics will go offline for 30-60mins while a file system copy of all the databases is performed.
  • When that’s done, Metrics will come back online. During this time, and throughout thewhole operation, data will continue to be collected.
  • The next 6-12hrs will be spent running a conversion script to move us to a new database schema (more on why later..)
  • During this time, processing (turning raw data into meaningful statistics) will be stopped, and once the above task is done, it takes about 6-12hrs to fully catch up again.
  • Everything should then be back to normal

Why We’re Doing This

The difference between theory, and real live data is vast. Now we have around a months worth of real data to analyze, we’ve found that we can make improvements to the system that just hadn’t been noticed in the theory part of Metric’s development.

We’d like to make those improvements for the good of the system, and hope you’ll bear with us during Monday while this work is done.

What Comes Next?

A few weeks down the road, there will be another tweak similar to this. I’m hoping we can also learn from this and fine tune the process so it has even less impact on users, but i’ll have to talk to you about that nearer the time when more info is available.

Thanks everyone…

11 thoughts on “Metrics Maintenance – Monday 10th April

  1. Nick, do you know what the current status is for converting the back-logged raw data into stats? Is it finished or still ongoing? I’m already reporting stats for today but yesterday I have basically no stats still. The forums concerning this issue have been marked [Solved]. I know there’s probably already a ton of people bugging you about this, but just a quick update would be great!

  2. I never realized how addicted I was to this service. Oh man.. must resist urge to check back every 5 minutes

  3. >>any update on how that is going?

    as planned, pls see original post

    processing will begin to catch up during today (tuesday)

    thanks

  4. I am seeing a ‘yellow’ light on my metrics page. I am hoping that it is due to the maintenance.. any update on how that is going?

  5. Aw, I guess I should have figured the API would still be up. Nothing to try and test with my plugin I guess. :/

  6. Wow, you’ve gotta love this business when you post that the sys is going down and folks start telling you how much they like the program

    thanks everyone

    The copy is taking a little longer than expected but should not take too much longer, then metrics will be available again and the next phase will begin.

    Cheers

  7. Like everybody here, I haven’t been using Metrics for long, but this brief outage makes me appreciate how central it is for me already. So I am spending the time I would normally spend obsessing on my stats to thank you for this great service.

    Thanks.

  8. I guess this will give me a good chance to test how well my WordPress plugin handles when the service is unavailable. I’ll consider the “outage” a feature Nick!

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