When you want to monitor sites built using the SilverStripe CMS, DawnTM is an excellent choice, so naturally, we’re using Dawn on our own websites, SilverStripe.com and SilverStripe.org, as well as on some of our clients' sites.
In the world of business this might be referred to as "eating our own dog food," but in this case, we can assure you that this metaphorical dog food is deliciously helpful.
Our Chief Technical Officer Sam Minnée uses Dawn to keep an eye on our sites. "We've optimised those pages on our site that we expected to get high traffic, but one thing that we've noticed is that we can get traffic spikes from search engines on less popular pages."
What we saw is that several search engines have been hitting silverstripe.com at the same time to index the site, spidering through all the pages. Because of the multiple hits on less optimised pages, this caused CPU and Apache usage to go up, and increased the number of database processes, all of which slowed down the whole site's performance.
"Although Dawn doesn't fix the problem by itself, it alerts us via email and text message, and provides more detailed information within the application. It can identify exactly where the issue is, tell us when it’s happening, and give us other metrics so we’re able to change the site configuration to get it solved," says Sam, "Dawn helps us identify exactly which pages are actually causing trouble, not just take an educated guess."
Each time we learn new things from Dawn, it gives us an opportunity to look at ways that we can continue to improve the service we provide to you. If you're keen to give Dawn a try, head over to our plans page and get a month's trial for free. We'd love to hear how it helps you keep your websites at their best.