Hi, I use email alerting as a primary method to get this type of information, and am also very hot on making sure that if I don't need to know about it, that the alerts are tailored so that inboxes are not cluttered up. We probably have a smaller environment than you (around 100 servers), but I know where you are coming from. We do also have a monitoring screen, and I had to get this set up on the request of the business, who wanted something graphical that people could see. Getting that exactly right is an art in itself, as they wanted people to be able to glance at business transactional data to ensure that we were still processing transactions on various payment websites. That meant we had to craft our own monitoring scripts to get at the information we needed. Andrew. -----Original Message----- From: blind-sysadmins-bounces@lists.hodgsonfamily.org [mailto:blind-sysadmins-bounces@lists.hodgsonfamily.org] On Behalf Of Darragh OHeiligh Sent: 20 December 2011 09:05 To: Blind sysadmins list Subject: [Blind-sysadmins] Keeping track of your environment. Good morning, I've asked about this a long time ago but I didn't really follow it up. Our environment has doubled in size in terms of servers over the past year. We now have two DR sites, I'm in the process of virtualizing our DMZ and we're expanding our SQL cluster. The amount of work that has been done is actually quite impressive if I do say so myself. The problem is that there's just too much information to digest every morning. I've syslog showing errors, What's up gold showing utilization and availability, SCOM showing system errors, System insight manager monitoring the SAN, Storage escential checking for storage bottle necks, OfficeScan monitoring for viruses and other infections and Nessus running security reports. It all mounts up to a huge amount of reports and statistics to monitor every day. The problem is, if I get distracted by OfficeScan for example, the other reports are neglected and I potentially miss things that have happened during the night. Of course, the other person that works with me can glance up at the monitoring screens and see at a glance what's up and what's not. He can see systems that are running low on disk space or using up far too much memory. I start an hour before this person so it looks terrible if I miss something that can be spotted by simply looking up at the screens. How do you monitor hundreds of servers? Are there any tips or tricks you'd like to share? We're working with a mixed environment here but if I need to use two approaches for monitoring both widnows and Linux then I don't mind. Once I can get information in a more condensed format without overwelming me with things I don't need to know about. Thanks. any suggestions will be appreciated. Regards Darragh Ó Héiligh Fujitsu Offices of the Houses of the Oireachtas, Fredrick Building, South Fredrick Street, Dublin2 Telephone: +353 (1) 618 3559 Email: darragh.oheiligh@oireachtas.ie Internet: http://www.oireachtas.ie _______________________________________________ Blind-sysadmins mailing list Blind-sysadmins@lists.hodgsonfamily.org http://lists.hodgsonfamily.org/listinfo/blind-sysadmins