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

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

On Sun, 7 Jun 2020 13:59:47 +0200
Johnny Billquist <bqt%update.uu.se@localhost> wrote:

> You are thinking simple metrics, which is a rather user centric item.
> I was trying to make that point before.
> 
> Think instead of things like reports on what binaries have been
> replaced in the system. How could you ever graph and aggregate such
> information?

Depends really on what information you want to see. You could graph the
number of binaries for each machine, or the number of suid/sgid
binaries that got replaced, change in size before/after, etc.

Some data may not be numeric, i.e. ssh or httpd logs, but you could
configure the tools to grep for particular events or error codes and
flag them. You can extract numeric data, i.e. how many ssh users log
in/out per day, how long their sessions last, or how many failed login
attempts happen, etc. You can probably do this to some extent with
email, but it's not as flexible with regard to data mining and pattern
visualisation. In my previous role, I frequently had to sift through
various system logs trying to figure out why system performance was
suboptimal and trust me, manually grepping through log files is no fun
and wastes a huge amount of time. I don't want to be looking at these
logs/messages in my email.

I view email as a very simple tool for receiving short messages and
emergency alerts, not for daily system monitoring and trouble shooting.
Of cause if you're only interested in short messages and alerts, then
email is quite sufficient. But I get the feeling this style of system
administration has probably outlived much of its usefulness.