[hobbit] Logfile monitoring - I'd like some comments

[Henrik Stoerner]

Hi Rolf,

On Wed, Feb 15, 2006 at 07:30:11AM +0100, Rolf Schrittenlocher wrote:
> Hi Henrik,
> 
> that sounds wonderful, your ideas are pretty good. 

Thanks.

> I have one suggestion and one point to think about.
> 
> For monitoring application-logs the config file soon would become very 
> complex and likely unreadable. There it would be nice if there is a 
> possibilty for include-files. So general definitions -e.g. for 
> OS-related logs - would be made in the general config  file, all the 
> individual stuff in <host>.config files.

That would make sense, I agree.

> Second, there are logs which change their names once the server or the 
> application stops. So a "message.log" might become "message<date>.log" 
> while there is a new message.log now. Still the last informations in 
> "message<date>.log" are relevant, especially if the reason for the new 
> log was a crash of the application. I don't know how to deal with this 
> situation as there are multiple ways how logs might change their names 
> but perhaps others have an idea of how to do that.

It's something I thought about too, although my concerns were with logfiles 
that get rotated at a specific time of day, not those that change when 
an application restarts. But like yourself I couldn't find a really 
good solution.

The file being renamed is not the only problem - it may get compressed,
moved to a different directory, ... lots of ways for it to get lost.

So - if anyone has a bright idea, do speak up.


Regards,
Henrik