[CentOS] Cron

Sun Dec 4 16:56:23 UTC 2005
Scot L. Harris <webid at cfl.rr.com>

On Sun, 2005-12-04 at 02:48, Sam Drinkard wrote:
> I have several crontabs running at various times of the day and night.
> All generate copious output.  All the jobs produce copious output, and
> some of them I need to see, while others are 's are just a pain in the
> butt to have t look at.     is there some method I can use to
> selectively monitor cron's output of the one's I want to, while
> ignoring the others?  Thanks...

You can try what I do with some cron jobs that send email.  I use my
email clients filters to examine the results that are generated.  If the
results are OK I mark the message as read and put them in a folder.  If
the results are not OK I just put the message in a folder.  If I see
that there are unread messages in that folder I take a look at the
results.

An example of this is tripwire.  I use the evolutions filters to examine
the report output for the words "No violation" and "No Errors".  If
those are found the message is marked as read and placed in the a
folder.  That filter is set to stop processing at that point.  If the
message does not contain either of those phrases a second filter just
moves the message to the folder.  A quick scan each morning shows me any
unread messages in that folder that require additional attention.  

You should be able to do this with most reports, just setup a filter to
find something that either indicates and error occurred or that
everything was OK then take the appropriate actions.  By having a filter
handle the initial checks I don't have to waste my time looking over
every single report.  But I still have all of them if I need to review
them.

This is what I do for my personal systems.  In a work environment I
would use a tool like Big Brother or one of its variations to monitor
systems an reports of that type.  Those tools provide a nice dashboard
that will show you problems on specific systems.