Like parent company Microsoft Corp., LinkedIn makes contributions to the open-source community on a regular basis. The social network bolstered its project portfolio once again today by releasing the code for a homegrown tool used internally to tackle technical problems.

Named Fossor after the Latin word for “one who digs,” the system is designed to help administrators unearth the technical information they require to accurately diagnose an operational issue. According to LinkedIn engineer Steven Callister, the project’s creator, it was developed to speed up the repetitive manual tasks historically involved in the process.

Finding out what’s wrong with a server or process requires administrators to run a series of checks on the affected system. These queries are typically performed one at a time and many are reused among incidents with little or no change. Fossor, which is written in Python, provides the ability to create templates of common checks that can be quickly executed when a problem emerges.

The templates take the form of plugins that can run simultaneously instead of one after another. This makes it possible to retrieve diagnostics data considerably faster, which in turn reduces the amount of time required to troubleshoot an issue and frees up administrators for other tasks. Moreover, plugins can be configured to filter operational information automatically to save users the hassle of manually finding the important details.

LinkedIn claims to have seen a noticeable improvement in incident response times since deploying Fossor internally. To help other companies adopt the tool, it’s rolling out the source code together with a collection of ready-made plugins for checking common operational details such as server memory utilization.

The extensible nature of Fossor means that a company can develop extensions tailored for its specific requirements if the default lineup isn’t enough. That customizability could potentially make the project appealing to large enterprises, especially since it’s also free and has been battle-hardened at one of the world’s top social networks.

Image: Ben Scholzen