[NFBCS] Accessible network and host monitoring system:

[Brian Buhrow]

	hello.  My suggestion is if you know what kinds of logs you'll be analyzing, you get some
samples and write yourself some scripts that can quickly scan them and give you various
overviews of the state of things.  This is what many monitoring programs do with colored
pictures and the like.  The trick here is digesting a lot of data quickly, which is what
scripts that you write can give you.  Scripts can do things like:

O  Tell you if  there are a lot of a specific kind of message

O  Tell you if there are any catastrophic errors

O  Tell you if there are unknown messages

In other words, they can help you quickly whittle down through the noise and tell you what you
should be looking at and paying attention to.  Such scripts will evolve as you learn more about
the systems you're monitoring operate and what's normal and what's not.

	If you can't get direct access to log files, but must use a browser to look at some tool
someone else has created, you might be able to write scripts that scrape that web site using
curl to achieve the same goal.

Hope that helps.
-Brian