PHP Library for OAS

It has take long -because of my lack of experience with PHP, but I have finally gotten around to designing a basic "standard" for an OAS library. I hope to have all the basic OAS Entities (example; Advertiser, Campaign, Agency, Etc...) up and running in 2 weeks. Check out progress at GitHub.

Monitoring - Our Basic Principles

So, we decided we'd create our own monitoring tool, to consolidate our monitoring of various systems in one convenient location and to allow our team to be more proactive rather than reactive. I am no expert in this field and as in my current gig -this has been the first time I received the responsibility for maintaining large scale distributed apps (ERP packages, which I worked with before are much simpler).

We had some very simple design goals. What we did not wish to do, was to spend time creating an application from scratch and getting into very complex monitoring scenarios in which we would have to manage an in-house monster. Our desire was to monitor for the 20% most common failures that were causing the 80% of the headaches. This being our idea, I took some time to talk to our OAS app specialist, who outlined the symptoms of the most common failures and how clients see these failures reflected in specific reports. On his suggestion, we decided that the simplest policy would be to monitor specific reports which let you know whether specific components have failed.

So what reports would we look at and what would it tell us?*

1. Site - Day of Month Delivery Information --> Are base transformers running?
2. Site - Hour of Day Delivery Information --> Are the base transformers running in real-time?
3. Site - Browser Delivery Information -> Because information summary tables are dependent on Nightly execution (one phase at least), looking at this report for the current day can give us hints of whether Nightly executed or not -it could execute partially, but we are only doing a general health check.
4. Inventory - Site Detail Forecast --> Like the previous report, this also gives us clues about Nightly's execution
5. Reach & Frequency - Site Reach by Date --> Are UV transformers running?
6. Last RLC --> Failure in RLC can have many causes, so it is just a good place to monitor.

*Bear in mind that we are aware that most of the monitoring can be done with tools such as Nagios. However, our situation is we do not have access to our client's monitoring tools and we have many environments to monitor.

This monitoring that we are doing allows us to get a sense of whether all is fine, using more "junior" staff, if there are problems we then escalate. This saves us valuable time! In our tool, we also decided to collect information from other sources (non-API).

Monitoring tool using the API

Looooong time no post! Was extremely busy with projects and issues here at work. However, I am extremely excited about a project I developed with help from a work buddy.

A little background, we have about 15 clients that have their box installation of OAS (with over 200 servers). We have an extremely compact team, relative to the size of our clients and yet we are responsible for maintaining proper functioning of all these servers. OAS does offer some rich set of monitoring options which send e-mails, that gives status updates on key components, but our experience has been that receiving around 100-150 e-mails a day has caused overload and made this type of monitoring not too effective.

We decided to create a very simple monitoring system, looking at OAS from the client perspective and making our frontend team responsible for proactive support -and they are much larger in number.

In my next few posts I will outline our concept as well as upload the tool and code.

The OAS AdXML Kit: What is it for, how to install & use

I have developed a simple DLL, to facilitate code development in Excel. Without this component it would be necessary to write some extra code in Excel to develop our examples. As I have mentioned before, I am trying to avoid focusing too much on code (but we will need quite a bit) and focus more on getting results -this is really what matters. The DLL is available through SourceForge (click here to download) and the installation follows a standard Windows installation routine. I will make the source code of this DLL available through GitHub, for those who prefer to see what is under the hood.

Once it is installed, it is quite simple to activate for use in VBA (MS-Office macro language). You will, in VBA screen, click on Tools > References and select OAS Integration Module as in the image below.

This will allow you to reference the OAS API by simply creating an object. An example of this follows, using VBA;

The worksheet associated with the code.

PHP code for automatic RLC

As a curiosity, I developed the following code to execute RLC. In terms of process, the main way I use it, is after I have executed all modifications to my campaigns I execute this code for RLC.

MS-Excel: Defending my choice

The examples I have outlined (see old post) have opted to develop using primarily Excel + VBA (we will use some PHP as well). Some of you may cringe at this choice -given that many in this industry are proficient in languages such as PHP, Ruby and Java... But my reasoning is simply that I wanted to develop examples using a tool that is available to most end-users.

Also this is not really a blog about coding, but more about showing with practical examples what can be done with OAS API. Additionally, Excel will allow us to avoid side issues such as some basic math -which we will not have to code for, we can simply use the spreadsheet. To avoid a lot of overhead in learning how to use SOAP through Excel, I have made available through SourceForge (link) a DLL which should facilitate access to the API.

Let's get started!

To get started we have to create our API user... I could bore you to death with a text explanation, but I have decided instead to post a YouTube video (much easier!)

This is really the easiest [booooring!] part, but if you have difficulties write me, I will try to help. The next step is for us to