People with new babies love to play with their babies. People with nice cars love to drive them. People with servers love to watch their servers’ logs, which tell the story second-by-second of all the cool things that are happening.
LogAnalysis.org is the site for us. Its Library contains tons of information about logging, log analysis, real-time log monitoring, log parsing software, even log rotation.
What tools or tricks do you use to keep an eye on your logs?
For day to day monitoring, I used to use Peep but now I have automated IDSes and whatnot looking for the big stuff, so I just keep a tail running in a window to look for interesting web site hits or whatever I’m curious about. Something like:
tail -F /var/log/apache/access.log /var/log/syslog |
sed "s/.*secret-page.php.*/&\n${(l:`tput cols`::*:)=}\n/
The -F flag keeps it running day after day, even when the log file rotates. And that little whizzery of zsh outputs a line of asterisks the exact width of the terminal whenever it sees that someone’s visited my secret web page.
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