Logtivity 3.0 is Here With Site Health Integration

BySteve Burge

Logtivity 3.0 started with a mystery.

One Logtivity customer reported that an active plugin had been disabled. Quietly, and with no warning, an important plugin changed from “Active” to “Inactive”.

A few weeks later, this happened to another customer.

Then a potential customer contacted us. They weren’t even using Logtivity, but this happened to them all the time. They wanted to know if we could detect these silent deactivations.

We couldn’t, but we became determined to solve the mystery.

The solution to the mystery

For weeks, we wrestled with this problem. Normally, Logtivity tracks actions that users take inside the WordPress admin. These silent deactivations were happening outside WordPress, on the server level.

We realized that the only solution was to keep a list of all the plugins on the WordPress site, and then track to see if that list changed. So Logtivity 3.0 is integrated with the “Site Health” feature in WordPress.

WordPress Site Health

This Site Health information from inside WordPress is now visible inside your Logtivity dashboard. We record your WordPress and PHP versions, plus the installed plugins and themes.

Site Health in Logtivity 3.0

Your dashboard now has a list of all the plugins and themes installed on your site.

Plugins screen in Site Health

This information is also used in key places inside Logtivity. For example, on the main dashboard you can now search to find all the sites with a specific plugin installed.

Plugin filter in Logtivity 3.0

Now, because we have a complete list of all the plugins on your site, we can warn you when that list changes without any human interaction. We’ll record a new log called “Plugin Active State Changed”. There will be no User or IP Address associated with the log because it happened silently. You’ll also find a note inside the log saying “Not done through UI”, and it will show if the plugin is now active or inactive.

Plugin Active State Changed log

You can use the normal notifications service in Logtivity to send you alerts whenever this event happens. This will send you an email or Slack alert whenever a plugin is silently enabled or disabled.

Create global alert for Plugin Active State Changed

What’s next for Logtivity 3.0?

Now that Logtivity can see your site’s Site Health data, we’ll be able to create logs for many more changes that impact your site, even if they were done silently, including PHP or MySQL version changes by your hosting company. Plus with a record of the plugins and themes on your sites, we can add more data to the logs, such as recording both the previous version and the new version involved in each plugin update.

We’ve solved the mystery that inspired Logtivity 3.0. But we’re going to continue our mission to shine a spotlight on the dark and mysterious events that happen on your WordPress site.