EC-Admin: administration procedures for new customers

Written by: Electric Bee
2 min read

When I started at CloudBees and worked with new customers on ElectricCommander implementations, they pretty much all had the same pattern of question: “How do I manage my jobs, clean up my database and my disk partition." The concern was that customers realized that the amount of disk space usage could add up fairly quickly since ElectricCommander data ends up in multiple places: (1) in the database where metadata is store and (2) in file servers where log files are kept. My answer was along the line “It’s easy, simply write a procedure and assign it to a schedule to run it on a regular basis." “But why isn’t it part of the offering?” was the usual follow-up question. I had to admit they had a point. Talking to my colleagues, it seems it was not an isolated case. If you have been an ElectricCommander user for a while, you understand this is not very difficult to write but for a new user it could be a daunting task to figure out all the involved pieces, the API, strategy on what to keep and what to delete, and how to obsolete data. It soon became very clear that I could put something together fairly quickly and publish it on CloudBees’s GitHub community for everyone to access. I started to work on it in my “spare time” to write some of those basic administration tasks that could be useful to some of my customers. My goal was not to create the ultimate ElectricCommander procedure but to provide a framework for people to use and expand as their needs grow. EC-Admin v1.3.2 includes:

  1. Job and space management

  2. Artifact management (including Artifact Repositories and Artifact Caches on agents)

  3. Semaphore management

  4. Project by project export for backup

  5. Performance metrics

  6. Perl code:

    1. function to invoke Commander API with integrated error management

    2. Perl Headers for XML and JSON format

    3. Function to get the value of a property (or undef if it does not exist)

Today this work can be accessed on our GitHub Commander repository at https://github.com/electriccommunity/electriccommander/tree/controller/EC-Admin Give it a try and let me know what you think by leaving a comment below or contacting us directly by email . This is an ongoing project.

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