One of my customers is becoming effectively a "backup service bureau" for many
remote departments (and the number of depts. they service is growing).
The central TSM admins have access to the TSM clients in the glass house, but
no access to the TSM clients for the remote departments.
Currently they use TOR to send email to the remote machine owners when TSM
clients fail or miss.
Remote admins often ignore the emails; general result is TSM clients miss for
long periods, and the central admins don't know whether there is a legitimate
problem, the machine has been decommissioned, or the machine owner has been
decommissioned.
They are looking for a reporting tool that will provide a better way to handle
this than sending email out into the vacuum of internet space and hoping for
results. (And yes, my customer already has service agreements where the remote
owners have agreed that dealing with the failures and misses is their
responsibility. But that's not working now, and when the rubber meets the
road, it's the TSM admins that get blamed when there are no backups!)
One possibility I can think of (short of writing our own apps) is to have TSM
send the info (via mail or snmp) to a ticketing system that generates a ticket
that has to be addressed or it gets escalated to a manager. But I have no
familiarity with such ticketing systems, so can't recommend one.
So, what do other people in widely distributed environments do for this?
Product recommendations welcomed, we'll look at them.
Thanks!
W
Wanda Prather | Senior Technical Specialist | Wanda.Prather AT icfi DOT com
| www.icfi.com
ICF International | 401 E. Pratt St, Suite 2214, Baltimore, MD 21202 |
410.539.1135 (o)
|