Site Overview
When you click on a site from Panopticon's main page you get to its Site Overview page. This gives you a bird's eye view of what is going on with your site and lets you take a number of administrative actions.
The Automations dropdown button in the toolbar lets you access features which control automatic actions for your site. The available options are:
- Scheduled Update Summary. You can create and manage scheduled tasks which generate a summary of available extension, plugin, and theme updates to be delivered to you by email.
- Scheduled Action Summary. You can create and manage scheduled tasks which generate a summary of detected updates, and actions take automatically and manually on the site to be delivered to you by email.
- Backup. You can create and manage scheduled tasks which take a backup of your site. Only available when you have Akeeba Backup Professional installed on your site.
- PHP File Change Scanner. You can create and manage scheduled tasks which perform a scan of your site using Admin Tools' PHP File Change Scanner feature. Only available when you have Admin Tools Professional installed on your site.
The Troubleshooting dropdown button lets you access features which help you identify issues and fix them:
- Connection Doctor shows you a page which checks if there are connectivity issues to the Panopticon API on your site, and tells you how to address them.
- Tasks shows all tasks scheduled for your site, active or not, and their current status.
- Log files shows you the log files relevant to this specific site.
At the top of the page you will see the basic information for your site.
At the very top it's the numeric site ID and the site's name, as set up in Panopticon. All the way to the other end is an edit button (pencil icon) which allows you to edit the site's configuration.
Below that, you will see the information about Panopticon's connector: the version, and its reported API level.
On the other side of the page you see the site's public URL and its administrator login URL.
ℹ️ Tip: If you are using Admin Tools Professional and have set up an Administrator Secret URL Parameter, the site's administrator URL will have that parameter in it.
If your server supports this feature, you can see a number of useful pieces of information about the server itself:
- The type of operating system (Linux, Windows, macOS, other), name, and version.
- The make and model of the CPU, along with the reported number of CPU threads. Please note that the reported number of threads may be higher than the number of physical cores. Cores with hyperthreading (performance cores, AMD ZEN cores, etc) have two threads each. That's why, for excample, an octacore AMD Ryzen 7 7700X will appear to have 16 threads; all of its cores support hyperthreading.
- The uptime, i.e. how long it's been since the last reboot
- The CPU load distributed user, iowait and system time. User time is your server serving your requests, running your CRON jobs, operating the database and web server etc. System time is used by the server's Operating System to do low level background tasks which are necessary to keep the system running. iowait time is the time wasted where the CPU sits idle waiting for network and disk operations to complete.
- The system load over the last 1 and 15 minutes. This number is a decimal. When it goes near or over the number of reported threads your server will start grinding to a halt.
- The utilisation of storage attached to the server.
Please note that some of these stats may not appear at all. When no server stats are available the entire Server Information pane will be missing.
Also keep in mind that these numbers are for the entire server, not just your site. Your site's operation is affected by them, but not all of these resources may be available to it. Hosts usually have monstrous machines with oodles of CPU power, storage, and memory but only a fraction of that may be used by your site at the same time. The reason we show information about the entire server is that a very busy server may not have less resources to give to your site than what you are allocated. If you see the CPU usage always being very high, or a very high iowait time (5% is pretty high, 10% is problematic, 15% means the server is seriously struggling) AND you observe degraded performance of your site you may want to talk to your host about moving your site to a different server.
Panopticon displays the version information for your CMS (Joomla! or WordPress) and PHP.
You can renew this information manually by clicking the renew button on either of the two panes; Joomla!/WordPress and PHP information is refreshed at the same time. Don't overdo it with the manual refresh, though! Panopticon automatically refreshes this information, approximately once every hour.
The CMS update information —including the latest available version— is reported by the CMS itself running on your site.
❓Why not have this detected by Panopticon itself? Because there's no such thing as a single “latest” Joomla! or Wordpress version. Which is the latest version you can upgrade to depends on which version you are using now, what is the PHP version your site is using, and which update channel you are on.
If your CMS version is out of date you will see a message about it, as well as information about whether and when the new version will be automatically installed, along with a button to install it manually. If the automatic update has failed, you will see the information about why it's failed and a button to clear the error, so you can tell Panopticon to retry the update.
If your Joomla! site is up-to-date but there are template overrides in core Joomla! and/or third party extensions which have changed, you will see a message, so you can review the template overrides. This information is provided by Joomla! itself.
If you are using Joomla!, at the very bottom of that box, there's an option to re-install the version of Joomla! you currently have installed. This might be necessary if you believe you've accidentally modified core Joomla! files (don't do that; it's called a “core hack” and is strongly frowned upon!), or you believe something else happened which messed up your Joomla! core files. This feature is not available for WordPress since WordPress itself does not offer a download link for the currently installed version.
The PHP version you see is reported by your site. Please note that most servers have multiple PHP versions available at the same time. The PHP version you see in your hosting control panel is not necessarily the same PHP version your site is running under; it's merely the PHP version the hosting control panel itself running under. Also remember that the front-end of your site, the API application, and the backend application may each be set up to run under a different PHP version — even though this kind of setup is highly problematic and must be avoided. If you disagree with the reported PHP version it's 100% certain that Panopticon is right and your assumptions about what your server is doing is wrong. This is not a matter of arrogance, it's a matter of fact for Panopticon's connector merely reports the PHP_VERSION constant which is hard-coded into PHP itself.
Moreover, Panopticon pulls a list of the latest published PHP version and the two milestone dates of each PHP version (end of active support, and end of life). Panopticon will let you know if your PHP version is out of date, or if you are using a PHP version branch which is about to become unsupported, is already only receiving security updates, or has become End of Life. If your PHP version is out of date keep in mind that it usually takes a few days for hosts to install the new version since it requires a few seconds to a few minutes of downtime, therefore most of them perform this kind of maintenance over weekends and bank holidays. If your PHP version branch is only receiving security updates you need to plan the upgrade to a fully supported version branch as soon as possible; security-only maintenance lasts for just one year, after which the PHP version you are using is generally not suitable for use on a live site (even if your host's Linux distributions provides backported security fixes; they only backport a selection of high priority security fixes, and they do not backport regular bug fixes at all!).
Panopticon provides a list of installed extensions Joomla, as provided by Joomla! itself, or plugins and themes, as provided by WordPress itself.
You can renew this information manually by clicking the renew button. Don't overdo it with the manual refresh, though! Panopticon automatically refreshes this information, approximately once every hour. Also remember that clicking this button tells your site to forcibly reload the update information for all installed software; this is slow and resource intensive. As a result, you should use manual updates very rarely.
On Joomla! sites not all software reported by Joomla! to be installed is listed. Only the “top level” extensions which are not part of Joomla! itself are listed. If you see sub-extensions which normally belong to a package, or core Joomla! extensions, being listed that's because there is a problem with your #__extensions table contents, namely the contents of the package_id field, for that extension. Fixing that is beyond the scope of Panopticon. On WordPress things are simpler. There are no core plugins / themes you can't/shouldn't remove, nor is there a concept of sub-extensions. You see all software installed in yoru site.
The filters let you display only a portion of the installed software, e.g. only software with missing Download Keys (Joomla! only), or only software with updates. Filters cannot be combined.
If there are automatic updates enqueued, running, or failed you will see the relevant information above the filters.
Each software is listed on a single table row. It tells you what its name is (e.g. “Admin Tools package”), its internal software identifier (e.g. pkg_admintools), and the Download Key (Joomla! only) if the extension says it requires one. If there is a Download Key, it appears blurred. Hover over the blurred Download Key to see it. If the Download Key is missing you will see a red icon with a tooltip saying that the Download Key is missing. Either way, there's an Edit button which lets you view and change the Download Key.
If automatic updates are enabled, or already enqueued for installation, you will see a magic wand icon next to the software's name.
You will see the author information next to each extension. If there is an author site provided, the author's name will be a link to that site. If there is an author email provided, it will be displayed underneath the author's name.
The last column shows you the installed version. If there is an update available you will see the new version number available. If automatic updates are disabled for this extension, or automatic updates have failed, you will see a button to enqueue an update for this extension.
The final panels you see are integrations with Akeeba Backup Professional and Admin Tools Professional.
They are documented separately under Backup Management and Security Management.
At the bottom of the page you will find an area for notes. Click the pencil icon to edit them.