What are your SMAT management best practices?

[Jim Rawls]

I’d be interested to hear about some of your SMAT management best practices out there.  For example:

1) Do you use cron jobs to cycle / save or prefer to cycle manually?  Why?

2) If you use cron, do you find it best to cycle by file size, time of day, number of messages, or something else?

3) What is considered an optimum number of messages to manage in a SMAT file?

4) Do you archive SMAT files?  For how long?

Anything else you’d like to add would be greatly appreciated.

Jim Rawls

Florida Hospital

Topic

[David Caragay]

Hi Jim,

1) Do you use cron jobs to cycle / save or prefer to cycle manually?  Why?

We run a nightly cron job to cycle all our saved message files.  Much easier since we probably have around 200+ saved message files spread out over 30 different sites.

2) If you use cron, do you find it best to cycle by file size, time of day, number of messages, or something else?

We cycle at every midnight.  Some threads may not produce a significant volume over a 24 hour period but it’s much easier to manage the .old files since they cycle all at the same time.

3) What is considered an optimum number of messages to manage in a SMAT file?

If you use the old SMAT GUIs, they will handle large saved message files much better than the newer SMAT GUIs.  The old version of SMAT was written in TK/TCL unlike the newer JAVA Version.   If you cycle each day, you should have no problem managing the files using the TK/TCL version.

4) Do you archive SMAT files?  For how long?

Depending on the saved message file, we may choose to keep only one cycle save before overwriting or we may choose to compress and save up to 10 days worth.  This is all done in the scripts we run each night.

Hope this helps.

[Vamshi Mugu]

Hi David,

A couple more questions:

1. Do you use any criteria to select what messages go in SMAT? Or, since you recycle every day, do you pretty much store every message that passes through the engine?

2. Would you be willing to share the logic you use for archiving SMAT messages? Do you just tar (& zip) the saved files? How do you index them?

Appreciate your help,

vamshi.

[Kathy Riggle]

Jim,

Our SMAT practices are similar to David’s – run by crons, everything is cycled daily, regardless of the traffic on a given thread.

We save everything in the engine for 14 days. Crons delete the files older than 14 days.

We also zip and archive everything for long term storage.

Kathy Rhodes Young

Heritage Valley Health System

[Author]

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