Now that My Book It is up and running, I have a lot of different things to keep track of. There are backups, maintenance tasks, student counts, invoicing, plus more to keep track of.
Most of these systems are automated, they have their time to run and most of the time they run successfully without intervention, but without monitoring of these tasks there is the potential for issues to creep in and cause lots of damage. (Say the backups start failing for a little while).
So I needed a business intelligence and management system, a system that I can use to quickly see that everything is OK and if not gain access to the information quickly. Within this system I want to have the ability to
- Quickly see that the backups have run successfully for the day, AND that all the databases have been backed up. (i.e. none missed)
- Quickly see that the maintenance has run for the day, AND what maintenance tasks ran for that day.
- Be able to dive into the logs to see errors if need be.
- Be able to see outstanding invoice balances, but also gain access to flexible reporting if required.
- Re-run a maintenance task if required.
- Create new clients (including database set-up)
- Have the ability to modify the new client set-up process to prevent having to deal with files etc. (i.e. break it up into steps that run so a step can be modified or added via the management interface)
- Run Items over each site (i.e. if the databases needs updating not have to set-up a whole individual file)
- See maintenance outputs (i.e. student counts etc)
- Full Invoicing features including credits, bad debts, invoicing, secure invoice access from remote sites, reporting)
- Client reporting
- It needs to be secure.
I am sure that more will get added to this over time but that will be a good start. Over the next set of posts I will work through these items and how I did them to get a full functioning (and useful) business intelligence / management system.