Yesterday. Sheesh. First, the little guy pops up with an ear infection. So, between the hours of 11:00 and 14:30, I'm running him to the doctor, picking up prescriptions, etc. He's fine, and while I hated to miss work (yes, I love my job), I figure it's better to be safe than sorry. Plus, since I'm salaried and Lori isn't, it'd cost us alot more than the doctor bill for her to take him....
He breathed a huge sigh of relief when he discovered that the doctor wasn't going to give him a shot. It was hilarious.
Once back at the office, I started digging around in Win32::EventLog. I can't believe Activestate hasn't made libwin32 available through PPM yet. Anyway, it was short work getting the module to compile.
I spent the evening writing a script to remotely access our NT/2K servers and report back some statistics on the Event Logs, as well as error and warning messages via Mail::Sendmail. It works like a charm. Beautiful stuff. But, with almost 75 servers, it's information overload. I'm going to have to identify certain error and warning codes that can safely be ignored. That would greatly decrease the amount of information contained in each email, and make "real" problems more obvious.
One of my few victories at my last job was in successfully insisting that the log analyses start out small and comprehensible (rather than comprehensive), and they mostly stayed that way. When "people" asked for pie-charts, and reports on every single user session (times a million), I simply said "You don't even read the log analyses that you're already getting, and when you do, you can barely understand even those. You want a novel-length report every week? No! And NO WEBTRENDS FOR YOU!"
Re:Logs
shockme on 2002-02-19T20:18:43
Heheh. Good point.Actually, this project is of my own undertaking. We've got 75 servers supported by 3 people, and I'm hoping that by utilizing this script, it'll help us stay focused on the "important" stuff and, at the same time, possibly give us heads-up on any impending doom.
;)
