Client Management Suite

Hey everyone,

I am wondering if there are any good resources on learning how to really use Altiris to its full potential. Right now it feels like the entire solution is just a mix and match of various bits and pieces and it makes it a bit convoluted to get through. I was wondering if there were any real good resources on the product? I've tried searching for some books, but haven't been able to find any.

Also, while I'm here, I have some issues I'm trying to figure out as the help documentation is less than helpful on this.

I'm trying to configure my system so that it sends e-mail alerts when there is a problem with a Backup Exec solution on one of our machines. Now, it seems like you can centrally configure an SMTP policy that would go out to all of these machines, but I'm trying to make it so that the NS itself sends out the alerts that it knows about rather than each machine individually sending out its own SMTP e-mails.

Would anyone have any good information on how to do this?

Thanks a lot. 

I posed a similar question in October.  I asked what training methods had been successful for people, and I got a few great responses.  You should read the thread.
https://www-secure.symantec.com/connect/forums/what-training-methods-have-been-successful-you

I haven't attended any formal training; I may next year.  One thing that has been helpful is hanging around these forums and asking and answering questions.  It gets you to look a little deeper at the product, get involved in some things you may not normally do in your own environment.  And if I see a question I can't answer but am curious about, I flag it for follow-up so that I can check back later to read responses.

I'm not familiar with BackupExec and how you determine if there is a problem.  I think you're looking at this the right way by finding a centralized monitor (Altiris NS) as opposed to a distributed solution (local system).  But your steps would look roughly like this:

1. What happens on the client?
2. Is this reported to the server, and if so, how?
3. Can I design a successful query on the server to find this information?

If you can answer all three, you can create a Notification Policy on your Altiris server based on the query, define how often it should run (that is, how often it should check for BackupExec errors), and what it should do (create a ticket, e-mail someone, or perform some sort of automated action).

I hope this is helpful.

@mclemson

Thanks for the resource I will definitely take a look at it.

Yes, the BESR Management plugin to Altiris NS does get at least basic "pass, fail, warning" messages from the clients. But where would I look at creating rules to send e-mails for that information? I tried the event console, but nothing seems to be in there. I've tried reading through help and it's very, very vague about how to do any of this.

 More pieces to the puzzle..

So I realized that I think it's a server job that I want to create.

Something like this:

-Grab the data from the SQL database. The filters used by BESR can be valuable here to an extent, though I think I might need to modify them.
-Pass that information off to another task to send an e-mail.

My question is, how do I pass SQL Query data results from one task to another?

Are you actually passing them multiple times?  I assumed you would be defining a single query, which the NS would run multiple times.  The NS can be configured to run a notification policy on a recurring schedule, drawing its data from a query.