scripting maintainance

I have question regarding writing a script for maintenance of 69 clients on my network. I would like to see if it is possible to force log rotations and also to clean cache on each machine and pull logs to a backup directory.

I plan on logging into each machine reading the host file and using ssh and pushing the file etc.

I am a newbie in shell scripting but plan getting more involved with the shell programming as I believe it will be beneficial in the long term for me.

Thank you in advance.