Stats Junkie

If there's one thing I know about people who are involved in network management, it's that they're stats junkies. Case in point. (Hah, I mean, how cool is it to poll the weather in OpenNMS...) I put that to the test in the last week, most definitely.

I got slashdotted (and ars technica'd, and dugg) a few days ago, and despite being under the weather, it fired me up to do 2 things.

First of all, it got me excited about working on KDE more. I had a great time at the KDE 4.0 release event and for the first time got strong feedback from KDE folks on what I've been working on. I got a little bit of that at aKademy but I also still felt quite a bit like the outsider there. This time around there were a number of people who gave me great feedback, encouragement, and all-around made me feel like a part of the community.

As a result, the thing I'd hoped would happen most after getting the press did happen -- the kde-darwin IRC channel is hoppin' with people not only willing to help test things and give bug reports, but willing to dig into the code, and help out in other ways. (One guy is designing a sweet web site that will hopefully be at mac.kde.org when we can get the administrative stuff handled.) And as for testers... well, there've been at least 1200 people who have completed downloading the "everything" torrent!

Second of all, I obsessively watched my web page and download stats. I can't help it, I love watching the graphs go crazy.

We, of course, monitor my web site with OpenNMS. However, I've recently switched to a new server at my hosting provider and I hadn't noticed that I wasn't monitoring the new machine. So thanks, ars technica, for getting me to monitor my new server. The cobbler's children finally got some shoes. 😉

I also use Google Analytics for web-site tracking. You can see in the graph on the right the difference between last week and this week. (Last week is the little green bit at the bottom of the graph...) This week I've had over 13,000 unique visitors, when about 1,500 is the norm. That's just crazy!

And on that subject, Tarus and I were talking about a bug reported to the discuss list related to my recent changes to the OpenNMS RPM packages. Tarus joked that "at least two people are running nightly snapshots" which, of course, got me thinking, "Hmm, our Yum downloads aren't recorded on SourceForge, I wonder how many snapshot users we do have..."

I figured it would be maybe 20 or 30 people brave enough to run the nightly version of OpenNMS. Boy was I wrong. A quick grep through the logs shows that since we started doing snapshots, we've had almost 8 thousand snapshot downloads, from 900 unique hosts. That's not people running the latest release, that's people running whatever nightly code got checked in the day before. Granted, we do a pretty good job of making sure trunk is always usable, but "usable" is not the same as "regression tested" nor "proven in the field."

All I can say is, thanks to everyone willing to try things out, it's great to see that we've got that many people willing to be on the front lines making sure our software works.