MOODLE MONITORING BEST PRACTICES

Learning Management Systems (LMSs) provide their greatest value when they are unobtrusive and don’t distract users from their education. Two aspects govern the obtrusively of an LMS: the user interface and the system’s performance. If the interface is logically designed and intuitive then users will quickly learn it, if the LMS is performant and responds quickly to user actions, then they will remain focused on their activities. Here we discuss metrics that describe the behaviour of a installation and can aid in troubleshooting performance related issue. We focus on the Moodle LMS running on the Linux operating system (although the metrics are applicable to other LMSs and other operating systems) and examine all of the layers of the applications stack, from the storage system through the operating system to the database and web server and into the LMS environment before finishing at the network system. We also illustrate the use of monitoring tools to display the real time metrics and their historical values which can be used to show usage trends and for capacity planning.