We've been talking about Dawn™ for a while now, but really, we'd rather show you it than tell you about it. That's why we've created the Dawn demo. Go ahead, click it open in another tab. I'll wait right here for you.
Okay, so what you're looking at is a live demo of the Dawn application. It shows you exactly what you'd be seeing as a Dawn user if you were to install it on your site - only the sites that we've got it configured to use are the real live sites SilverStripe.org and userhelp.silverstripe.org. You're seeing what we see when we keep an eye on them. We figured that providing a real world scenario rather than something that's fake would be the best way to give you an insight into what you really get with Dawn.
Now, let's unpack what you're looking at in more detail. The Dawn application looks at the different layers that power a website. Starting right in the middle is the overall status of a website. Moving outwards, we find the operating system, then we've got the web server, the database, and finally the SilverStripe layer on the outside. You'll see more information about each of these layers pop up on mouseover, and clicking any of them will take you to more information. The colour of each circle and the length of the line changes according to the severity of any problems.
In the picture above, (which may look different from the live site, as things change all the time), you can see that the SilverStripe layer on SilverStripe.org has some issues. If I was the project manager on this site, I'd know this meant I needed to talk to my developers. The developers are then able to see the exact errors (including stack traces) that SilverStripe reports, which gives them a starting point for debugging.
With Dawn's dashboard, you don't need to be able to code in order to assess the health and state of the site, but if you are a developer, it's very useful for you as well.
While you're playing with the demo, you might want to go into the settings and choose the charts you want to look at. You can also filter to see what issues you want to see, or use the slider on the dashboard to go to previous days, or project the future. Any time you come across an issue, click it for more information.
Because this is the demo version, you won't be able to save your changes, or close issues once you've resolved them. But you should still be able to get a pretty good overview of Dawn.
Of course, your own sites are probably of more interest to you than SilverStripe.org is. That's where our free 30 day trial comes in! To give Dawn a go on your own site, sign up now. Yes, it will ask you for a credit card number, but those details are held separate from SilverStripe Ltd, and we won't charge you anything unless you decide to keep using Dawn past those 30 days. Naturally, we expect that you'll find it indispensable once you get started!