We use NOM 6.5 to monitor 23 master servers spread around the globe. Some of these sites have limited local IT support, and the more tools we have to make management of these servers easy the better off we are. In the past we had to wait until our Perl script generated site summary reports came out daily to determine the health of our sites. We now have a consolidated view of our systems and can perform much more robust reporting. I can see in the dash board all the key statistics that an Operations Engineer would want to see before getting that first cup of coffee.
Some of the most useful benefits are getting email alerts when a drive goes down, or we run low on scratch tapes. 6.5.4 has a nice new canned report that shows all of our virtual clients and when they were last backed up. I realize that there is a more robust tool out there from Symantec, but for the money (free) it’s hard to beat NOM.
You can also move ahead to the next patch on your NOM server before upgrading your master. I would recommend going up to the latest and greatest 6.5.4 at the moment, for stability and performance it has really come a long way since 6.5. Today i was quickly able to UP drives in Utah, Paris, and Hong Kong without RDP, NetBackup Java Consol, or calling the local IT support.
Attached is a presentation i did on our install.
