Questions[reporting](server)

I am working on a project where we need to be able to tell and report periodically on what software is installed on our various Linux/Unix servers. I have looked at this, How to inventory what software/roles a Linux server is "serving up" to clients?, posting and this, Open-source inventory agent, posting and was not able to locate information that would suggest an answer to my issue. I am not sure that the OCS Agent would report on Linux/Unix servers like it does in Windows. Are there any scripts, open source software, software agents, etc. that can be used to run against a large number of Linux/Unix servers to report on what software is installed and what versions are installed?

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Updates for clarity:

I am looking for a reliable way in which to determine if particular software exists on a Linux/Unix machine. Ideally, this would be a remote solution where I can point it towards the servers in question and have it return the results indicating if the software in question exists on that box or not. Also, should I be concerned about the following issues relating to installed software on a Linux/Unix host?

1. Software installed from packages
2. Software installed from source
3. Software that is installed to an unknown or unexpected location

How would I go about handling these conditions along with finding out if the software exists?

I work for a Fortune 500 company that struggles with accurately measuring performance and availability for high availability applications (i.e., apps that are up 99.5% with 5 seconds page to page navigation). We factor in both scheduled and unscheduled downtime to determine this availability number. However, we recently added a CDN into the mix, which kind of complicates our metrics a bit. The CDN now handles about 75% of our traffic, while sending the remainder to our own servers.

We attempt to measure what we call a "true user experience" (i.e., our testing scripts emulate a typical user clicking through the application.) These monitoring scripts sit outside of our network, which means we're hitting the CDN about 75% of the time.

Management has decided that we take the worst case scenario to measure availability. So if our origin servers are having problems, but yet the CDN is serving content just fine, we still take a hit on availability. The same is true the other way around. My thought is that as long as the "user experience" is successful, we should not unnecessarily punish ourselves. After all, a CDN is there to improve performance and availability!

I'm just wondering if anyone has any knowledge of how other Fortune 500 companies calculate their availability numbers? I look at apple.com, for instance, of a storefront that uses a CDN that never seems to be down (unless there is about to be a major product announcement.) It would be great to have some hard, factual data because I don't believe that we need to unnecessarily hurt ourselves on these metrics. We are making business decisions based on these numbers.

I can say, however, given that these metrics are visible to management, issues get addressed and resolved pretty fast (read: we cut through the red-tape pretty quick.) Unfortunately, as a developer, I don't want management to think that the application is up or down because some external factor (i.e., CDN) is influencing the numbers.

Thoughts?

(I mistakenly posted this question on StackOverflow, sorry in advance for the cross-post)

I use Google Analytics today to notify me of big traffic spikes. In my case, a big traffic spike is typically due to a link from a prominent website.

Google Analytics includes a new "Intelligence" feature to report on spikes. Unfortunately, today it only reports that I had a spike, but doesn't report the referring site; instead it reports the geographic region of the traffic, e.g. "California."

This isn't a very useful dimension to report on, because geography is almost never the cause of the traffic spike; it's almost always due to a referring site.

Is there a way to configure Google Analytics Intelligence to report on the cause (the referring site) of traffic spikes?

Simple setup, single Windows 2003 standard server running as a printer server.

Domain users have rights to print to all of the printers setup on the printer server.

Question:

I know the event log can log printing, but I'm looking for a detailed logging and reporting solution that can give me the following:

• user account that printed the print job
• time/date stamp
• print job details (number of pages, Kb size, filename/path printed)

I'd like to be able to report as follows:

• Date Reports (date or range)
• User report
• printer report
• (and of course combinations or sorting of the above)

Any suggestions or ideas on how to do this with 3rd party software or built-in software would be excellent, thanks!

I'm looking for a Windows eventlog analyzing and monitoring software for Windows Server 2000/2003 (there are some new features in Windows Server 2008.) The feature set should include:

• real-time monitoring (alerts via email or other messages)
• definition of events/event groups which are watched
• multiple-server
• reporting (daily/weekly etc. reports)
• nice client tools
• not necessarily free or open-source, but that would be nice (of course)

Any recommendation or tip how to implement this using standard tools?

Thanks!