[TriLUG] Software search

[Rick DeNatale]

On 1/17/06, mike shlitz <mshlitz at yahoo.com> wrote:
> Hi,
>
> I'm interested in recommendations/opinions of two
> types of software, something that can be used to
> generate "trouble tickets" and another that can take
> log data from server/network feedback and arrange it
> into a nice report format suitable for sending to a
> customer.  Any advice or caveats would be greatly
> appreciated.

I've been thinking about installing request tracker
http://freshmeat.net/projects/requesttracker/ based on the
recommendation in Limoncelli and Hogan "The Practice of System and
Network Administration"  of course in my case it's overkill since my
userbase numbers 2, and I'm one of the two.  I'd mostly use it as a
to-do list for my mostly self-generated sysadmin tasks.

Not sure what you are looking for on the log analysis side, but you
might want to have a look at logwatch for looking for "anomalies", or
awstats for statistics.  Since you are doing this for client
consumption, I suspect you're more interested in the latter, logwatch
out of the box is configured more for use by sysadmins looking for
problems.

Awstats is mostly used for web server log analysis, but it is
customizable for other uses. It doesn't, as far as I know, generate
mail, instead it generates html.  I'd also warn about making it
generally available since it's had some security vulnerabilities in
the past (although the known ones have been fixed).


--
Rick DeNatale

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