Greetings Readers,
This post applies to Sitecore Version 8.0 Update 3 (150427) and higher.
Did you ever feel a need to track your sitecore config changes ?
Did you want to know what were the configuration at a certain time ?
Did you want to know how your caches were performing or the rendering statistics at a certain time ?
If the answer is yes, then this post is for you, Sitecore out of the box from version 8.0 Update 3 has a Sitecore Configuration dumping feature which creates and dumps a zip file of the configuration in your data folder.
Here is the processor which does the magic
The above processor is defined in the Sitecore.Diagnostics.config configuration include file and supports various configuration settings such as
Add custom files which needs to be tracked (This is great where you can track almost any file which you want)
Modify the location for storing configuration files (Default : $(dataFolder)/diagnostics/configuration_history)
Support for Zip compression
Note : Sitecore cleans up the above folder with items which are older than 30 days, you can increase of remove the automatic clean up from the Sitecore.Diagnostics.config file
Additionally Sitecore also does periodic dumping data from /sitecore/admin/stats.aspx and /sitecore/admin/cache.aspx pages to the file system The location and format of the log file can be configured as part of the processor configuration. By default, dump files are stored in /diagnostics/health_monitor in the Data folder.
This gives us a chance to travel back in time and look at our site configuration files, rendering statistics, cache status etc…
Here is a snapshot of the folder structure as the data is dumped
Configuration Files Dump
Cache and Stats Dump
There you go, hopefully I gave us all developers one more reason to LOVE SITECORE….. :)
