Building for Enterprise Search Part 2

When we left off, Michael Klatsky, VP of Systems Administration was telling me how important communication between the systems side and search side of is to developing an enterprise search solution. The process of building, testing, monitoring, adjusting, more testing, and more monitoring ensures systems function that way they are intended to function. Let's resume our conversation where Michael discusses the tools he uses to ensure the system he's building works the way the client wants it to. This is the second portion of a two part blog post.
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Tools for BDD: Part 2

Karen: It's sounding like the Search Team and Sys Admin Team need to have a good relationship and communicate often to ensure the system will accommodate the work the search team does.

Michael: Yes, search sometimes has to construct their scripts to conforms to systems. Testing is run on both sides, but small changes can affect others down the line, so it's important to incorporate expected behaviors into modeling and monitoring on both applications and systems sides and how they interact with one another.

Karen: How do you make sure that happens?

Michael: We're exploring some tools to help us make sure the machine will act just as we expect it to, like cucumber and cucumber nagios We're using certain tools to facilitate the systems behaves in the way that we expect it to. We're exploring cucumber for basic modeling and for testing. Cucumber is cool for testing because it returns values to you in colors. Red, meaning it failed, yellow meaning there's problem, and green meaning its good. According to their docs, they instruct you to "keep running it until it's a cucumber."

Karen: Ah, I get it.

Michael: Right. And what cucumber nagios does is it takes cucumber and allows you to create a nagios monitoring check script. So if you pass, great, if you god red, nagios will throw an alert to the systems administrator so we have an opportunity to fix it before more is built.

Karen: Sounds like it's an attentive way to build a system.

Michael: The only way to scale is to have machines do things for themselves. That's the way to do it.

Karen: To automate.

Michael: Yes. Automation. Not to just set things up to automatically do configuration management beforehand, but to test afterwards to determine that your machine is behaving just as you (and your client) envisioned it.

For more information on how you can plan your enterprise search in cooperation with your systems administration team, contact us for a free consultation.