Newsgroups: comp.unix.admin
Path: utzoo!utgpu!news-server.csri.toronto.edu!torsqnt!tmsoft!eci386!jmm
From: jmm@eci386.uucp (John Macdonald)
Subject: Re: Summary: log file and mail message filtering programs
Message-ID: <1991Apr8.145915.6596@eci386.uucp>
Keywords: Summary log mail filters
Reply-To: jmm@eci386.UUCP (John Macdonald)
Organization: Elegant Communications Inc.
References: <1991Apr1.160108.12136@nas.nasa.gov>
Date: Mon, 8 Apr 1991 14:59:15 GMT

In article <1991Apr1.160108.12136@nas.nasa.gov> vancleef@nas.nasa.gov (Robert E. Van Cleef) writes:

    [ a summary of responses to his request for methods for
	automation of log analysis ]

|Here is a summary of the replies. Apparently there is only one tool "watcher"
|freely available and one commercial product "XRSA" ...

    [ ... ]

|--------------------------------------------------------------------------
|Here is the full collection of replies: hope it helps... Bob

    [ ... ]

|> From: dick@ccnext.ucsf.edu (Dick Karpinski)
|> Subject: XRSA does just that
|> 
|> There is a commercial product from a software house in Canada which
|> does just that sort of thing.  It's called eXpert Remote System
|> Administrator and uses possibly some AIish software in the central
|> host to reduce the data coming in to just the part that's most
|> interesting to the human attendants.  They seem to want $20k/yr to
|> get into the game, so I'm interested in cheap clones.  Many of us
|> human administrators ought to be willing to collaborate on a public
|> access package like that.  PERL pops to mind as a useful tool for
|> many of these tasks.  I have lotsa stuff from the xrsa folks if
|> that would interest you further.  I'd like to pursue this matter
|> to the point of having some tools and a continuing sysadmin mailing
|> list for enhancements etc....

Umm, I hate to look like I'm doing marketing on the net, but Dick's
figure is wrong except maybe in a specific sort of context.

The base price for XRSA is about $2k/yr per system monitored.  There
are additional considerations possible (like if you want to license
the entire suite of software and not use an external server it does
get up to a starting price of $20k/yr, but that includes a minimum
of 5 systems being supported).

Robert's summary of replies included mine, so I won't repeat that
info here, but anyone interested can send me email with any specific
questions or for general info.

We agree with Dick that Perl is a useful tool for doing many of the
tasks - we use it in the central analysis portion of XRSA.
-- 
sendmail - as easy to operate and as painless as using        | John Macdonald
manually powered dental tools on yourself - John R. MacMillan |   jmm@eci386