Actually, we're legally bound by our audit department to maintain copies of our computer logs for a minimum of 2 years, and 7 years in certain cases. We keep them on tape (via the mainframe), but it was a nightmare to maintain individual scripts to stop a service, copy the log to an archive location, give it a unique name, and restart the service. We had - in one case - 4 copies of the same script in 4 locations to back up logs for 4 instances of a web server on the same machine. Each script was just slightly different in structure, the result of different people troubleshooting various problems. This script was the solution. 1 script in 1 location, managing any number of logs. One of our servers has 11 logs managed with this script - Event Log, PerfMon Log, 3 web instance logs, 2 LDAP logs, 2 Cold Fusion logs, and 2 SilverStream logs!
Oh - we don't ignore the logs, either. We have scripts (perl, sorry!) that parse the logs, strip off the info messages, then summarize the warnings and errors in an email each morning to the admin staff. This lets us get a quick view of the kind & number of warnings on each of the 200+ servers. With 300 more being deployed this year, we rely heavily on automation.
Glenn
_________________________
Actually I
am a Rocket Scientist!
