Platform Management
The Platform Management section includes topics covering maintaining and optimizing your Sugar instance's on-site platform.
Topics
In order to effectively monitor an on-site instance, there are 3 main aspects of the service that require attention:
A clone of your instance should always be created if you wish to test a change without risking your Sugar data or installation. This article will cover the three basic steps involved in cloning your instance:
When building a Windows-based stack to host Sugar® on-site, there are various web server and database applications available to use. Two popular combinations are IIS with MSSQL and Apache with MySQL. This article compares the advantages and disadvantages of both options.
We discuss how to use a batch file to make a simple backup of your Sugar® instance in a predetermined location in the Creating a Backup Batch File for Windows Servers (Simple Working Copy) article. If you are not familiar with it already, please take a moment to review it since this article will be building on this.
Backing up is a good thing. Disk space is cheap and your time is not. But, if backing up is too difficult or such a pain to do that it never actually gets done, it's not of much good.
The phpinfo() function is a diagnostic tool that can help output information about your PHP configuration on the server running Sugar®, including the PHP version. Creating a phpinfo.php file will provide information regarding your PHP installation's configuration settings, paths, and libraries. Please keep in mind that the file should be created in the directory of the site or application you are troubleshooting to ensure that the information provided pertains to that specific environment. For more information regarding phpinfo(), please refer to the phpinfo documentation available on php.net. This article will cover how to create a phpinfo.php file to help troubleshoot issues in your Sugar instance.
When considering changes to your on-site deployment, you may need to determine which type of database your instance uses.
Customers with instances hosted on Sugar's cloud environment may request backups of their instance for various reasons such as local sandbox development, in-depth analytics, data auditing, etc. For more information on the Backup Storage Policy, refer to the SugarCloud Policy Guide. Sugar Support can schedule and provide backups on a one-time or recurring basis (e.g., daily), based on your organization's needs. To request backups for your instance, you must file a case with the Sugar Support team. Please note that uploaded files are not included in backups by default. If you would like to have your uploaded files included in the backups, please put in the request on your support case.
When running Sugar on-site, it is important to optimize your server to get the best performance possible. In this article we will show you a couple of performance-optimizing options, primarily PHP caching. PHP caching is used in combination with PHP and the web server to build and store dynamic information. This allows for PHP to operate more efficiently. For more information, please refer to the PHP Caching documentation in the Performance pages of the Developer Guide specific to your Sugar version.
This article will go through the process of migrating an on-site deployment to the SugarCloud environment.
This article will go through the process of migrating an instance on Sugar's cloud service to an on-site environment.
When locking down file and folder permissions, it can be helpful to move Sugar log files to their own folder. Sugar, by default, writes log files to the root directory; it also rotates log files when they reach a certain size (10 MB). For this to function properly Sugar needs permission to create and modify files in the root folder. Some system administrators may not want to allow create and modify permissions on the root folder.
You may, on occasion, need to move your sugar instance from one server to another. This can be done in just a few simple steps, but before starting any data migration project you should first make sure no one is in the system, perform a backup, and verify functionality on the new server before retiring the old system. System administrators for On-Site instances are responsible for setting up the stack and taking/restoring backups as it is not supported by SugarCRM.
You may, on occasion, be required to provide a backup of your on-site instance to SugarCRM Support in order for our team to troubleshoot possible issues. System administrators for on-site instances are responsible for creating these backups as doing so is not supported by SugarCRM. This article will provide instructions on how to create a backup of your on-site instance without including any potentially sensitive data using MySQL commands as an example.
Sugar requires the ability to update and create files on your host server's files system. You will need to set the file and directory permissions in your Sugar installation folder so that the web server under which your Sugar installation is running, has the proper file access permissions. At a bare minimum, Sugar must be able to update and create files in the root of the Sugar installation as well as in certain directories and sub-directories. The Linux and Unix operating systems use a file permission system comprised of read, write, and execute permissions for the user and group that own the files and directories, as well as all other server users who have direct access to the file system. These file system permissions are represented by a numbering scheme that equates back to the file permissions.
When running Sugar on IIS, you need to make all of the files and sub-directories within your Sugar installation writable by the system user that IIS is running under. You do not need to do this when running Apache, because Apache does not respect Windows file system permission settings.
Sugar allows you to specify default permissions and ownership of files created by the application when Sugar is deployed on a Linux OS.
If your instance is hosted On-Site, you may run into one or more of the following issues after installing Sugar because of file permissions, PHP.ini settings, and .htaccess settings:
Sometimes, after installing SugarCRM in a root-folder the css-style sheets of every theme are not linked. As a result, the theme does not display correctly. If this happens, check if you have set the file and directory permissions in your Sugar installation folder so that the web server under which your Sugar installation is running has proper file access permissions.