Multiple remote servers question?

[carling 10]

Dear technical guru's!

 

I work for an IT company and we have approximately 450 remote servers which we "manage" by waiting for customer phone calls informing us of a problem etc. Every customers is responsible for checking their own backups which to be honest I think is crap.

 

I think it would be much more prudent to be more proactive and get email notifications of backups sent to us so we can call the customer before they realise there is a problem.

 

However, thinking about this I'm not sure about the best way to implement this idea. The servers are a mixture of Windows and Linux, some BackupExec, Acronis, shell scripts etc. Sending the email is not a problem, its organising the emails we do receive. For example the worst case scenario is somebody checking every single email, looking at all the verification and backup failures logging into each server diagnosing the cause etc. Then trying to work out which servers have not emailed because internet is down, /var full, UPS has shut the server down and our own internet problems etc etc.

 

The vision I have is possibly a web front end with a list of servers and columns saying email received, backup status etc.

 

How do some others deal with a similar problem? Quite interested to hear any ideas.

 

Thanks in advance

[Ghozer 112]

How about using an email filter on your incoming server or client (Thunderbird can set them up) and have 'codes' in the subject line, or organise problems by priority etc.

 

then filter the P1's into a P1 folder etc...

 

or if you have key words like "FAILED BACKUP" or "FILE WARNING" etc, you can filter these into different folders, you can also set them up so each server has its own X@domain - and filter the server name (X) into its own folder also.