Centurion ERP Production Usage

[jon-nfc]

This issue serves the purpose as a means of notification and to track the Production readiness of Centurion ERP.

Whilst Centurion ERP is usable, there are countless missing features that would be expected when using an application within a production environment.

Note

Currently the Centurion UI is undergoing a rewrite. The current UI is feature frozen, as is API v1 endpoint. Any mention of a centurion feature or its usability will refer to its usage from the new UI and API v2 Endpoint.

Logging / Metrics

Logging is an important part of an application. Currently Centurion itself does not produce any logging that is of use. This does not mean there is none, however depends upon the Centurion administrator to ensure that the areas that do log, are setup correctly. Logging is available within the following areas:

• Reverse Proxy
  ALL web requests made via the interwebs

• API Container
  Nginx logs ALL web requests to Centurion

• UI Container
  Nginx logs ALL web requests to Centurion

• Worker Container
  Celery worker logs

• IdP if you have setup SSO
  All attempts to log into Centurion

The Above logs do enable audit logging as well as the ability to monitor Centurion.

Tasks

• Assess and implement better logging
• Celery Prometheus exporter
• NGinX exporter

Testing

For stability, testing is arguably more important than writing the code for the feature. This is our position and will remain.

With that said, time is not on our side. As such we focus on releasing a feature and ensuring that prior to doing so any security and data integrity items are tested. Whilst not ideal as there may be bugs within feature, it enables us to be able to progress Centurion at rate that is more than one feature a month or two.

On v1 release of the ui (nofusscomputing/centurion_erp_ui#18) testing of Centurion as mentioned above should have improved greatly, namely due to catching up (feature and testing of features parity).

Tasks

• Outstanding Tests / Checks #375

Features

Again due to time constraints, a feature may exist that could be buggy. In an attempt to reduce the impact of this upon end-users, our internal Centurion Instance (Yes, we use Centurion ERP), Always deploys the latest commit on the Feature branch we are currently working on. Whilst we do not recommend this for production use we should hopefully be the first to discover any bug prior to that feature branch being released to the stable branch.

Currently the following features are not recommended for use at all:

• Ticketing System;

  • Change Ticket
  • Incident Ticket
  • Request Ticket
  • Problem Ticket
  • Project Task

• Device Inventorying Device Inventorying #437
  This feature has not been update in some time to cater for the logic changes within the application. It is not tested at all and may lead to inconsistent data.

• Current UI.
  The current UI whilst functional is far from a production usable UI. Simply put, the data integrity testing is either missing or severely lacking

• Model Notes
  Dont use model note tab on the details page of any model. This feature currently is not tested and data integrity is is lacking

Warning

API v2 is considered beta. As such is subject to change. API v2 endpoints will be set as stable on release of nofusscomputing/centurion_erp_ui#18

Tasks

• Planning Document: version 1.0.0 centurion_erp_ui#18
• Device Inventorying #437
• Update inventory plugin to use API v2 ansible_collection_centurion#37

Summary

You are encouraged to make you own assessment for if you should us Centurion ERP. With that said, the following will bring about a significant milestone of importance:

• Planning Document: version 1.0.0 centurion_erp_ui#18

  • v1.0.0 of the UI will solidify API v2 and ALL of its endpoints.
  • Will enable the removal of API v1 Remove depreciated API path #343

• Centurion v2.0.0 Planning Document: version 2.0.0 #349

  • Removal of the current UI
  • Removal of APIv1 Endpoints
  • Removal of incomplete tests (current UI and API v1)
  • Change in testing policy wherein no feature will be released without fully testing.

[jon-nfc]

/cc @jasonpagetas