On Tue, Sep 13, 2005 at 12:02:40PM -0500, Brzozowski, Dwayne wrote:
> I have heard people mention Aptare before. It probably would be a good tool
> to use. The problem is, I don't have the time to install,configure, and
> support another tool of that nature. Maybe one day...

Aptare StorageConsole is an awesome product.  It's not much effort to
manage - it basically takes care of itself and the server is treated as
an appliance. 

If you continually add a lot of servers you may want to group them for
easier reporting but you certainly don't have to.

> Anyway, I finally wrote a script a while back for reporting. 

If you can write custom scripts and support them all yourself, you can
certainly do so.  However, with StorageConsole you don't have to do that
and the person who fills your shoes after you leave will have a much
easier time.

> We have a multitude of various customers and separate each customer's
> policy by a 4 letter, somewhat of a code that begins their policy
> name. That way, I can run my script for reporting and parse each
> customer report by the 4 letter descriptor in the policy, and send
> output to each customer every morning before I even get out of bed.
> They like the output so I'm happy.  I've included some of the output
> from the report produced by my script, with explanations. 

That's do-able in StorageConsole too - you can crank out your own
reports out of the database.  One of the main benefits of SC is that you
get a long-term history.  The other day our director asked for a yearly
trend on backup volumes - that's something that you can't do relying
only on NetBackup and shell scripts without some sort of add-on product.
My director has a login to the SC portal and answers most of the
questions himself.  I'd rather be an admin than a report generator.

        .../Ed

-- 
Ed Wilts, Mounds View, MN, USA
mailto:ewilts AT ewilts DOT org