[plug] Managing status email

[James Devenish]

In message <1079192954.12095.13.camel at localhost.localdomain>
on Sat, Mar 13, 2004 at 11:49:14PM +0800, Carl Gherardi wrote:
> At work we have many servers and services that mail status info for a
> variety of things. The sheer number of these email is becoming
> problematic, as i'm not paying every email the attention necessary and
> missing errors occasionally for several days.

Is e-mail the best medium for reporting "status normal"? (Would a
graphical display be easier.) There is story about someone who modified
the cockpit of his aircraft so that all the analogue needles would point
in the same direction under normal conditions. Personally, I like to
hoard e-mail but divert uninteresting mail somewhere where it won't
bother me. (That is, if your "situation normal" e-mail can be matched
against pre-determined templates, then you can divert those ones to a
"happy" folder while the rest go into a "sad" folder.) In my "situation
normal" e-mail, there are a few things for which I would like to know
about ongoing trends or status (disk space would be one example), but I
read that out of a graphical display rather than reading it out of
e-mail (it is present in e-mail nevertheless). For aggregating mail, I
just filter reports with a bit of Zsh or Python scripting (depends on
whether these reports are being generated daily or hourly). With cron
jobs, I like to suppress output when status is "okay" and only send
e-mail if there was abnormal termination.