Re: Postfix and local mail delivery - still relevant in 2020?

[Sad Clouds <cryintothebluesky%gmail.com@localhost>]

On Sun, 7 Jun 2020 13:03:47 +0200
Johnny Billquist <bqt%update.uu.se@localhost> wrote:

> The alternative, even more so with the VMs, is that you would go into 
> each and every machine and check the state there every day. That do
> not seem to scale very well...
> 
> Having the reports instead sent to some central place seems exactly
> what you would like to do...

I agree with your last statement, however I'm still wondering if doing
this via email is a good approach. It works for simple reports, but as
the details and complexity grow, this may become unmanageable.
Extracting data and trends from simple text emails is possible, but
seems to be a rather cumbersome process.

Have a look at these graphs:
https://oss.oetiker.ch/rrdtool/gallery/index.en.html

This is the type of format that allows you to easily manage complex
subsystems. Especially if the tools can automatically aggregate data
from multiple machines and display metrics on a single graph.

I'm thinking about a design where each system has a small framework for
collecting various telemetry data. You activate various plugins and
they automatically collect metrics + logs and archive them in a
central place. This is somewhat similar to how emails get stored on a
central server, but much more sophisticated, as the framework has
specific tools to graph and visualise daily reports.

There are commercial and free frameworks that do this, but they seem
quite bloated and probably include web servers and SQL data bases. It
needs to be much simpler but with very good tools for data analysis.
A bit like DTrace but designed for this specific use case and more
emphasis on automatic graph generation.