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Re: Module to limit email floods?

by dwm042 (Priest)
on Oct 14, 2010 at 21:28 UTC ( [id://865356]=note: print w/replies, xml ) Need Help??


in reply to Module to limit email floods?

The best way to limit alert messages and/or email alerts is to not use them, as they don't scale.

Monitoring tools with web interfaces do scale. They also allow you to drill down, to find out just when a problem happened, when you can actually respond to the problem.

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Re^2: Module to limit email floods?
by Corion (Patriarch) on Oct 14, 2010 at 21:32 UTC

    But "getting an email" is passive while "web interfaces" is active. And believe me, people prefer to be passive over being active, at least when it comes to looking after things.

Re^2: Module to limit email floods?
by RatKing (Acolyte) on Oct 15, 2010 at 08:28 UTC

    Thats a nice idea that will not work, as I assume the reason for sending the SMS alert is to be able to leave the house and not have to look at a screen all the time.

    I would still suggest looking into a Nagios like solution that deals with all the monitoring, shows the cool webpage and has the ability to contact you via SMS, email or both. It is a very mature tool that has long since dealt with this and many other problems you will face when monitoring a system or systems. Pretty much every single major soft and hardware solution has modules available to monitor the solutions specifics which will make your life so much easier. Writing your own monitoring solution is really simple and should allow you to save a lot of time as all you need to do is let the central system know about your findings all alerting is dealth with by the central system so no worries there

      RatKing,

      It's far more than a nice idea that will not work. Just work in a place where hundreds of scripts send out thousands of emails a day -- I've had more than one job with those parameters -- and the alternative is not only desirable but eventually necessary. Doing systems administration via email trail is a way to waste alerts, fill email boxes and waste admin time.

      No on-the-job script should ever send out an email alert. It should alert a monitoring tool, such as the aforementioned Nagios. A higher end layer of software, or a help desk, can decide to alert admins *if necessary*. This is the kind of thing that a smart shop can automate and a foolish shop will drown admins in electronic paper.

      Things get missed in floods of spam. So the smart thing to do is stop the spamming, consolidate the reporting, and push the alerting to a decision making layer. Status messages can then be consolidated in a web interface, as they should be.

        ++
        You win! You gave the correct answer!

        I'm going to nagiosify all my email-sending scripts... real soon now...

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