One of my customers is becoming effectively a "backup service bureau" for many remote departments (and the number of depts. they service is growing).
The central TSM admins have access to the TSM clients in the glass house, but no access to the TSM clients for the remote departments. Currently they use TOR to send email to the remote machine owners when TSM clients fail or miss. Remote admins often ignore the emails; general result is TSM clients miss for long periods, and the central admins don't know whether there is a legitimate problem, the machine has been decommissioned, or the machine owner has been decommissioned. They are looking for a reporting tool that will provide a better way to handle this than sending email out into the vacuum of internet space and hoping for results. (And yes, my customer already has service agreements where the remote owners have agreed that dealing with the failures and misses is their responsibility. But that's not working now, and when the rubber meets the road, it's the TSM admins that get blamed when there are no backups!) One possibility I can think of (short of writing our own apps) is to have TSM send the info (via mail or snmp) to a ticketing system that generates a ticket that has to be addressed or it gets escalated to a manager. But I have no familiarity with such ticketing systems, so can't recommend one. So, what do other people in widely distributed environments do for this? Product recommendations welcomed, we'll look at them. Thanks! W Wanda Prather | Senior Technical Specialist | [email protected] | www.icfi.com ICF International | 401 E. Pratt St, Suite 2214, Baltimore, MD 21202 | 410.539.1135 (o)
