Log management

[Mike McGrath]

On Tue, 12 Jan 2010, Maxim Burgerhout wrote:

> After last weeks meeting, Mike asked me to look into a solution for
> log management, reporting and alerting. As the new guy, I happily
> jumped in and so here's a short status report on what I found and what
> some of the options are. I would appreciate any input.
>
> First of all, there's a lot of different projects trying to deliver
> this functionality. A big part of them though, are either dead,
> commercial and / or mainly aimed at parsing Apache logfiles.
>
> I am assuming we want an open source tool, so, skipping the commercial
> products like Splunk and skipping the dead projects, it boils down to
> these as most promising. If I turn out to be missing some great
> project, please tell me and I'll look into it.
>
> 1. octopussy (http://www.8pussy.org/dokuwiki/doku.php)
> Log aggregation tool, providing a one stop web UI to view all logs for
> a bunch of servers, complete with alerting to email, jabber or nagios,
> creation of graphs etc. Imports data into a MySQL database. The
> downsides are that it's developer base is pretty narrow, it is
> relatively complex to configure and it is Debian centric in both
> documentation and available packaging. On the other hand, octopussy is
> what comes closest to Splunk in the open source world that I know of.
> Sadly, all other Splunk-like apps are commercial. Last release:
> December 2009, last commit a couple of days ago.
>

octopussy is mostly perl and xml it looks like.  My main concern with it
is that it seems to have only one contributor.  Might be worth setting up
to look at though I'm not so sure we need real-time analysis.

> 2. logreport / lire (http://www.logreport.org/)
> Log parser that runs from cron or manually; parses logs from many
> different applications and generates html, txt or pdf that can
> optionally be mailed to people. Slightly odd curses configuration
> frontend. Works by importing log files into what is called the 'dlf
> store' and renders periodic reports from that data. Can receive
> logfiles over mail. Downside is that development is pretty slow, even
> if it is backed by a foundation (about one release per year; last one
> was in March 2009). Low mailinglist traffic. Does not do alerting and
> real time parsing. DLF has sqlite as a backend, afaict, and I'm not
> sure how well that scales in the long run. Last release: March 2009,
> no activity on mailinglist and CVS since then.
>
> 3. epylog (https://fedorahosted.org/epylog/)
> Has some fans in the Infra group already, it seems. Modular log
> parser, run from cron. Stores offsets for already parsed files, to the
> next run can start where the previous one left off. Generates reports
> in html in a configurable location or sends them out per mail. Custom
> report delivery methods can be configured. Does not do alerting and
> real time parsing. Hosted on Fedorahosted, written in Python (the
> other two apps are mainly in Perl). Very easy to write custom modules
> for. Last release: none recently, but subversion is active.
>
> Of the projects, only epylog is packaged for Fedora already and
> Octopussy is the only one that does realtime log parsing and alerting.
>
> What should be the next step in this? I probably need to do some more
> testing, but before I do that, let me know what you think is important
> in a log monitoring and reporting application? Any specific tests you
> would like to see done for these apps?
>

Personally I'd like to get general metrics from the logs and list errors /
warnings that we would care about.  The problem is we never really know
the format of some errors we get.  We had recently gotten some memory
errors from fedorahosted and no one noticed it until we happened to log in
and see it.

I think I like the idea of a single nightly report that is easy to read
through.  The trick is figuring out what should be in that report I guess.

What are others using for log analysis?

	-Mike