After upgrading to OpenX 2.8.7 from 2.4.1 our statistics suddenly seemed to have vanished. Debugging an issue like this isn’t just straight forward, but after digging through google searches, wiki pages at OpenX and, well, reading the source (brrrrrrrrr), I think I’ve nailed it.
After upgrading to 2.8.7 the DeliveryLog plugin didn’t get installed – which meant that no delivery / clicks / impressions were logged. After discovering that this had been moved to a plugin I tried simply unzippping the plugin and copying the files to the plugins/-directory. This seemed to make OpenX recognize the plugin if I went to “groups” in the plugin menu, but not under the “plugin” menu. Another problem was the fact that it didn’t actually log anything, which could be considered a problem.
All the Google searches had shown that OpenX had changed the logging format to a new table structure (named buckets), but they don’t provide of restoring / creating the bucket tables if they don’t exist, and they don’t give any error about the bucket tables missing if the plugin doesn’t load. I couldn’t find anything at all about how the tables should look and which tables should be installed, but I finally tried to simply install the plugin through the web interface (Log in as Administrator -> Select Plugins in the top menu) by uploading the zip file directly, and then FINALLY the post install script ran. That created the tables (I’ll dump the definitions later if someone needs them), and after reloading the ads the bucket tables started getting values.
Now we’ll just have to hope that they actually gets aggregated into something useful as well..
PS: I’m less than impressed by the OpenX upgrade procedure, it always seem to fsck up some detail that leaves your installation in limbo, without being able to detect that something has gone wrong and provide a way to resolve the issue. I understand that they need to – and want to – focus on their pay product, so well, I’ll keep having to fix things manually for a while, but Google’s Doubleclick for Small Businesses may see a new customer soon.