R7 email log notification enhancements

[awnews]

The new email setup (sending both errors *and* successful log messages) in Retrospect 7 is the *germ* of a good idea. I'd like to suggest a few things however:

 

1) Provide a way to cluster messages. With everything (errors and successful) turned on, I'm getting a gazillion little emails throughout the day. Some are separate messages for each line of a single multi-part log message. I'm thinking of a setting that allows a) email for every message [as happens now] grouped log emails every N-hours c) grouped log emails every N-days, d) grouped log messages when then are more than N messages, etc. It would also be nice if some summary info was provided in the subject header or beginning of the message (2-errors, 5-warnings, 6-success) to highlight (visually or via an email filter) if there was an immediate need to review the email.

 

2) The absence of an email message may or may not mean that everything is OK. If there's no event (e.g. no error/warning and no successful backups in an interval as described above), I'd like the *option* to either send no message *or* send an "empty" message (email includes time & date but explicitly states that there have been no events). This would confirm that Retrospect is alive and kicking and that nothing was going on as opposed to just not sending a message (Retrospect has crashed, the server has crashed, email is down, the network is down, etc.).

 

3) I did notice in at least one case that I did not get an email for a backup with a *lot* of errors (there seems to be a problem with the client PC but I haven't got around to checking it out). The R7 log shows a long list of errors (e.g. problems reading directories) but either this email never got sent *or* something about the message caused the SMTP server to reject it (e.g. too big, malformed, etc.). I don't believe the problem in on the (POP3 & web I/F check) receive end (receive email server allows large size, no filtering).

[BillIrwin]

Excellent suggestions. Adding a log entry that an e-mail was sent would be helpful in diagnosing why one doesn't arrive.

[JeffV]

Over the users, Veritas has pretty much scienced out e-mail notification. Current versions of Backup Exec mail me a slick, HTML page that includes a log and a summary with expandable sections that let me drill down to whatever level of detail I want, and a top-level summary of errors hyperlinked to the portions of the log where they occur so you can easily viewed them in context.

 

And as long as I've used Backup Exec (many, many years) the software has notified me of ALL successes, including those with "minor" errors. Success notification is the ONLY way to know that the backups are running at all. (And as unreliable as the Retrospect Launcher is...that's important information!)

 

Now, it's not perfect, you understand. The things I'd change are to have BE e-mail me once per day covering all backup jobs that completed that day, and, especially, that if you select HTML reporting, you would no longer get a message without the report attachment and another with the attachment. That last one seems really dumb; I've never understood why they do that. I haven't seen version 10 yet; maybe it doesn't do that any more.

 

Dantz, if you want to see the right way to do notifications, at least for your products that target the enterprise, download an eval copy of Backup Exec.