MailWatch vs. MRTG

[Steve Douglas]

Thank you taking the time out to provide feedback on these packages.  I do
believe it is time for me to crack my knuckles and take a serious look at
them.  Since I installed MS I feel kind of out in the dark (even though I
know it is doing a great job) with no way to easily validate the stats of my
server.

Thanks again for the feedback!

SD
:-)


> -----Original Message-----
> From: Gerry Doris [mailto:gerry at dorfam.ca]
> Sent: Tuesday, September 09, 2003 11:21 AM
> To: MAILSCANNER at JISCMAIL.AC.UK
> Subject: Re: MailWatch vs. MRTG
>
> > Hi Steve,
> >
> > Here's my opinion - I use both, and I'm the author of MailWatch - IMHO
> > they
> > were both designed with different goals in mind and it depends on what
> > your
> > requirements are
> >
> > MailScanner-MRTG is brilliant for monitoring your mail server and
> getting
> > the top-level statistics from it - also, it is lightweight on the server
> > itself, and dead easy to install and requires little or no changes to
> > MailScanner itself to operate.
> >
> > I designed MailWatch with a specific goal in mind - we used to use a
> > commercial content scanner here and it *sucked* (even though it was
> > expensive), but it did have a reasonable UI for a helpdesk to use but
> the
> > reporting also sucked.  I wanted something that would allow me to see
> > message level info (to, from, subject, size, sascore, status etc.) of
> > recent
> > messages processed by MailScanner(s) and to generate management reports
> > from
> > this information and to allow the Helpdesk to release quarantined
> messages
> > and respond to mail queries amongst other things.
> >
> > MailWatch is NOT easy to install, however I've attempted to make it a
> bit
> > easier in 0.3beta.  It does require minimal changes to MailScanner, and
> it
> > will also introduce extra load on the server, although this is fairly
> > minimal and even less so in 0.3beta.
> >
> > Hope this helps.
> >
> > Kind regards,
> > Steve.
>
> I installed MailWatch the other night.  The install instructions were
> clear and I didn't find the process overly difficult.  There is more
> involved than installing mailscanner-mrtg but should be easy for anyone
> who can read.
>
> Mailscanner-mrtg provides 15 graphs covering the last 24 hours and are
> updated every 5 minutes.  Each of these graphs can be clicked on to open
> similar graphs for the last week, month and year.  The graphs show the
>
> - # of emails received
> - MB of emails received
> - # of spam messages
> - # of virus messages
> - # of copies of mailscanner running
> - # of copies of sendmail running
> - amount of memory used
> - cpu load average
> - cpu utilization
> - ethernet traffic
> - space in /var/spool
> - space in /
> - space in /dev/shm (ram disk)
> - # files in incoming queue
> - # files in out going queue
>
> I find these graphs to be great for a casual look to make sure everything
> is running correctly.  For example, after playing with the server last
> night I checked the graphs and noticed that there were two more instances
> of sendmail running than there should be.  I'm not sure how I caused this
> but it was easly fixed once I noticed.
>
> The MailWatch application provides a wealth of detailed information
> (including graphs of much of the data) on what your server is doing.  You
> can see details of each individual message (sender, receiver, headers,
> spam count, size, date, and time).  Spam messages are highlighted in pink
> and virus messages in red.  All of this data is kept in a mysql database
> and a multitude of reports are available to sort and graph the data in
> various ways.  It's easy to see who receives the most mail by either
> volume or size.  Which domains send you the most mail (# of messages or
> size).  What are the spamassassin rule hits on your mail.  etc...
>
> Both of these packages are very well done but intended for different uses.
>  If I was given a new email server to administer I'd immediately want to
> install these packages. There's been a lot of work put into them and it
> shows!
>
> Gerry