[hobbit] Bug Report: Critical error in log couldn't be sent to server every time

Hubbard, Greg L greg.hubbard at eds.com
Fri Jul 25 15:45:10 CEST 2008


Samuel,

If you think this through, you probably don't really want the Hobbit
agent to send that much data up to the Hobbit server every 5 minutes.
You are welcome to modify your own source code to change the 100K limit
to anything you want, but I think you will be better served to look for
a near-real-time log filtering process that can process your big, busy
log on the local host, and then spit out "significant" messages in
another log that you can wire into Hobbit.

I do not have any solutions to offer, but I think you can probably find
plenty of options if you spend a few minutes in a Google search. 

-----Original Message-----
From: Samuel Cai [mailto:Samuel.Cai at ehealth-china.com] 
Sent: Thursday, July 24, 2008 8:01 PM
To: hobbit at hswn.dk
Subject: RE: [hobbit] Bug Report: Critical error in log couldn't be sent
to server every time

Hi, Steve

For your two suggestions, I checked the source codes, there is a 100K
limitation, so it doesn't help to introduce ignore if the Error is out
of that range. So you may wonder why we output more than 100K in just 30
minutes, there are several reasons:
1. It is our production server log, which is busy.
2. We set level to Warning, which output more than Error level 3. Some
our codes did not set log level correctly, we're in the process of
cleaning up it.
4. If there's exception, we output whole thread log in INFO level, which
is huge.

Anyway, I still think 100K in 30 minutes is a little small value for a
busy site's log, I would like to remove this limitation and also keep
cleaning up our logs.

Thanks for your suggestion,
Samuel Cai

-----Original Message-----
From: s_aiello at comcast.net [mailto:s_aiello at comcast.net]
Sent: Thursday, July 24, 2008 8:41 PM
To: hobbit at hswn.dk
Subject: Re: [hobbit] Bug Report: Critical error in log couldn't be sent
to server every time

On Wednesday 23 July 2008, Samuel Cai wrote:
>> It really depends on what log level your application is logging at.
If
>> you are
>> logging at 'INFO' level, then there will be alot of data to process.
As
>> you
>> see, Hobbit implements a limit on how much log data it will parse.
This
>> is a
>> good thing, at least in my opinion.
>>
>> It all depends what is in your log... and why soo much data is being 
>> written.
>> If they are all errors, well hobbit would be catching them telling
you
>> there
>> are errors. Since this is not the case.. would guess your log has
data
>> other
>> than errors.
>>
>> Suggestions:
>> 1. tune your application log settings so that only errors are
written.
>> 2. make use of the client-local.cfg log's setting of ignore. This
will
>> allow
>> the hobbit client to identify what is an extraneous message, and
ignore
>> it.
>> Per the man page:
>>
>> The ignore PATTERN line (optional) defines lines in the logfile which

>> are ignored entirely, i.e. they are stripped from the logfile data 
>> before sending it to the Hobbit server. It is used to remove 
>> completely unwanted "noise"
>> entries from the logdata processed by Hobbit. "PATTERN" is a regular 
>> expression.
>>
>> I hope this helps you,
>>  ~Steve
>
> It's great to hear you guys, Hubbard and Steve, that you also find
this
> is a limitation (more than a bug), not wrong in my configuration.
>
> I was thinking to modify source codes before, but it might be
difficult
> for me. I'll try your suggestions, thanks!
>
> Samuel Cai
>

In my reply to your email, I said that this behavior "was a good thing".
I do
not find this to be a limitation at all. I offered you two possible
solutions, were any of these applicable ?

The "limitation" really resides in whatever application is logging soo
verbosely. Production level applications should have their logging
limited as much as possible whenever possible, only logging indicators
of errors.
And
whenever this isn't possible, make use of the IGNORE option.

 ~Steve

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