I have built a number of 'SA utilities' by the expedient of tracking the requests I issue in the course of a day. If I find that I am doing a particular, complex, query more than three times a day, it becomes a candidate for a utility code, and I add it to my little list. When I find myself at loose ends (boring meetings, 45 minutes until the car-pool leaves, etc), I pop the top item of the list and write the script for it. The resulting code works in my current environment, but will probably never get ported outside the Company. It would take a fair amount of work to produce portable and general enough code for posting to CPAN.

Over the past six months I have written utilities to:

• Check each member in a server-cloud and report back on the percent running over 75% CPU busy
• Check each member in a server-cloud and report which boxes are under 'environmental stress', defined as mother-board temperatures over 85F. (Far too many. This particular script was turned over to the Hardware folks the week we had three boxes go thermal in one day.)
• Check a server-cloud and report on how many members have a particular configuration set active
• Check a server cloud and report on the number of open HTTP conversations
• Check the status of a load-balancer: how "hot" is it running? How many servers is it fronting? What is the five minute trend?
• Check on the status of machines in the test lab; who is up and who is idle
• Wander through the last five minutes of the Apache logs in a server cloud and report on the most popular source and destination IPs. Ditto for the most popular errors.

Most of these were a couple of hour projects, nothing fancy, no seriously strange code involved, not particularly well documented (blush).

I have a couple of bigger problems on the list, associated with walking through SNMP trees of MIBs. I can get the Network usage information from the Network logs, but it will be 8+ hours old. I want to be able to look at the servers and routers that I Care About in a shorter time frame, say the last fifteen minutes. The Network Manager, would love to have the tool, too, but she doesn't have the body to assign to it. So I have an over-the-Christmas-break project.

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