Sysadmin Dashboard ADR

lms/djangoapps/dashboard/decisions/0001-sysadmin-dashboard.rst

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+1. Sysadmin Dashboard
+---------------------
+
+Status
+------
+
+Accepted
+
+Context
+-------
+When operating an Open edX installation, it is convenient to allow admins and course staff to perform some tasks from
+the web browser instead of requiring access to django managment commands. These tasks include
+
+- creating user accounts
+- importing courses (from git)
+- deleting courses
+- gathering cross-course enrollment data
+
+The SysAdmin Dashboard feature has remained functionally unchanged since 2015, but it has never been documented.
+This ADR serves to captures the decisions that went into it, so that we may being the process of moving it out of
+edx-platofrm and into a pluggable django app.
+
+Decision
+--------
+
+The users tab provides Web based user management (create and delete user accounts), a listing of courses loaded,
+and user statistics. There is also a button to repair the external authentication map, a task relevant to open
+edX installations using Shibboleth and certificate-based authentication.
+
+The courses tabs manages adding/updating courses from git, deleting courses, and provides course listing information,
+including commit hash, date and author for course imported from git.
+
+The Staffing tab provides a view of staffing and enrollment in courses that include an option to download the data
+as a csv.
+
+The Gitlogs tab provides a view into the import log of courses from git repositories. It is convenient for allowing
+course teams to see what may be wrong wit their xml. This is the only view that allows permits access by course
+staff, so they can review their own course import logs.
+
+Consequences
+------------
+
+The Sysadmin dashboard is little used outside of MIT and difficult to maintain. Many of its features have been
+replicated elsewhere in edx-platform. It coudld be refactored as a pluggable app, but some of it's features rely on
+internal edX APIs. In a subsequent ADR, we will identify the APIs that would be necessary for extracting the Sysadmin
+Dashboard.