SendmailAnalyzer is enterprise-ready

SendmailAnalyzer is a log analyzer for the Sendmail mail transfer agent (MTA). It can process maillog files nightly or in real time, and generates dynamic statistical reports in HTML with graphic output that let you know at any moment what is going on on your mail servers. It can show hour, day, month, and year views for historical reports, and provides cross-linked navigation to detailed views. In short, it tells you what you need to know for better performance analysis, troubleshooting, and resource management.

The software is easy to install on any *nix server that supports Perl, CGI, and libgd, and highly configurable to match the dozens of possible Sendmail configurations.

SendmailAnalyzer is small and fast, and useful on everything from small enterprise MTAs to those at ISPs that handle millions of email messages per day. It can work on a single MTA server or on a central syslog-dedicated server. It can produce reports for all the major milters (Sendmail filters), such as SpamAssassin, MailScanner, ClamAV, Amavis, RBL Check, and J-ChkMail. In addition to admin-oriented information, it can present IT and customer information such as message direction distribution and per domain reports.

Gilles Darold, the developer behind SysUsage, which we profiled last week, created SendmailAnalyzer seven years ago to help manage the four Sendmail servers at his company, which handle as many as three million email messages per month, and run spam and virus filters. “As a busy sysadmin I only had time to do some grep commands on maillog for troubleshooting, so I looked for a tool to create cumulative and historical reports on email traffic and highlight Sendmail errors. I never found anything very useful, so I built exactly what I wanted.”

Like SysUsage, SendmailAnalyzer is written in Perl, with libgd producing PNG graphics. SendmailAnalyzer doesn’t use a database, just flat files, so there’s no elaborate software to install.

Darold welcomes user input via the project’s home page. “If you find something is missing, just drop me an email and I will include it.” Users who want to help develop the software are invited to add support for more milters and filters.

Monitor your servers with SysUsage

Your servers won’t tell you when they’re starting to feel sick. You have to keep a close eye on them for signs of poor health. One good way to do that is with SysUsage. This system monitoring and reporting tool, whose latest version came out this week, generates historical graph views of system activities using the sar utility from the sysstat package and system commands, giving you the information you need for performance analysis, troubleshooting, and resource management.

SysUsage is easy to install, configure, and use. Once it’s set up, point your browser at http://yoursystem/sysusage/ and you’ll see as much information as you can handle – or if not, you can add to the software via its plugin menu.

Creator Gilles Darold began building SysUsage in his spare time in 2003. For the last 10 years, he has been a network and system administrator for French company Group SAMSE, a big organization with 4,500 employees and 250 Linux servers. “In my work I use all of the available tools for system and network monitoring, but they are all incomplete and/or painful. Take Nagios, for example, which we use. It’s perfect for uptime monitoring, but if you want to monitor your systems’ health it’s really a hassle. SysUsage is simpler, more pragmatic, and SysUsage can even make threshold report to Nagios on everything it monitors.

“Another problem with using a complex, centralized tool occurs when you want to keep track of WAN systems and the link is down. You can lose the remote server health monitoring. With some applications, if you lose your central monitoring server, you’ve lost all your history. With SysUsage each monitored server is responsible for its own reports, and you don’t need a central server to display them – just a web browser.”

SysUsage is written in Perl. “For me that’s the most efficient programing language in term of time and power,” Darold says. He uses RRDtool to manage data over time, and libgd to create images.

In addition to hosting the project on SourceForge.net, he also lists it at freshmeat.net, “where users can subscribe to receive notifications about new releases of software. This is a known lack in SourceForge.”

While SysUsage is a mature package, Darold says the application will evolve as Linux evolves. He also says the next upcoming release will concentrate on plugin development, to give users a strong plugin database. “I can always use help, not so much in SysUsage development itself, as Perl is like my native language, but with features requests and plugins. The future of this software is more in the plugin community than in major code development.” The best way to get in touch is to drop a line to Darold via the contact link on the project’s home page.

Connect everyone with Group-Office and watch productivity skyrocket

Twenty years ago, groupware – software that combined e-mail, calendaring, information sharing, and other collaborative activities – seemed to offer a promise of unlimited productivity. And in fact applications like Lotus Notes did help many organizations. Today, technology like the Web and wikis have made collaboration much easier, so yesterday’s groupware has changed with the times. One shining example is Group-Office, which offers a suite of tools that includes shared calendars, projects, time registration, file sharing, tasks, and a billing application.

Group-Office comes in two version: Professional and Community. Most people download and employ the free, open source Community version, according to Dutch developer Merijn Schering, who owner Intermesh, the company responsible for Group-Office. The Professional version includes extra modules that let users synchronize data with mobile devices, perform project management, send newsletters, integrate with office software, and do online file editing (see comparison). Schering says the company sells about 200 Professional packages per year. There’s also a hosted version that’s identical to the Professional version, where Intermesh maintains an organization’s data for a monthly fee based on number of users and disk space usage.

“I decided to make some modules that are particularly interesting for businesses commercial,” Schering says, “because otherwise it would be impossible to keep our business alive. Ideally everything should be open source, but that wouldn’t make enough money to pay for our expenses.”

All the versions of Group-Office share a friendly, intuitive user interface, and the software can use LDAP or IMAP for authentication.

Schering began working on what eventually became Group-Office in 2002 when the mechanical engineering company he worked for needed to put drawings online “so we and our customers could get the technical drawings from the Internet. After that was completed I started to add stuff like an address book and simple mail client, and we called it Group-Office. In 2003 the economy wasn’t very good and we stopped with this company. I asked my colleagues if they would agree to offer Group-Office as open source on SourceForge.net. When we did that I started to get a lot of positive feedback on the project, and get some business out of it, so I decided to forget about mechanical engineering and launched Intermesh, which today employs three programmers and one designer.” The company also receive patches and translations from the community.

The roadmap for future versions includes plans to make Group-Office communicate better with other software – “for example, to link with web meeting software or VOIP solutions. We also want to improve the existing links system with automatic linking of e-mails, and we are developing a Z-push ActiveSync back end.”