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

[Hubbard, Greg L]

My two cents/pence/francs/pesetas/whatever (I am overcharging):

I think it would be cool if the Hobbit client could watch arbitrary log
files for arbitrary messages and turn that into status alarms.  But
don't assume that /var/log or /var/adm or /var/adm is accessible to
ordinary (as in Hobbit client) users -- not around here, anyway.
Besides, I already have another solution for managing my UNIX syslogs --
what I don't have is a way to manage all of my application log files.

Wonder how it would work if the client somehow retrieved "orders" from
the BB server at startup and this was used to drive  a client-side
scanner?  I like the notion of centralized configuration, but...

Otherwise, you might as well forward all the logs to the central server
(syslog-ng?) and have the server parse them.  But this wouldn't work for
the logs that I want to root through with the clients.

GLH 

-----Original Message-----
From: Rob Munsch [mailto:rmunsch at solutionsforprogress.com] 
Sent: Wednesday, February 15, 2006 4:22 PM
To: hobbit at hswn.dk
Subject: Re: [hobbit] Logfile monitoring - I'd like some comments

Henrik Stoerner wrote:

>the amount of log data that Hobbit needs to process. So you can setup a

>regexp of stuff in the logfile that you *never* want to see, and a 
>regexp of stuff that you *always* want to report - regardless of how 
>much the log grows.
>
Well, that covers my comment.  I'd much rather give a list of "this
stuff is always Good" than try to cover every instance of Bad, so that's
awesome.

It would be ideal if the central config was somewhat bb-hosts-ish, and
could accept (in addition to aforementioned includes) host-specific
directives for what to log.  I am assuming that how to react will
already be host-specific like every other test, yes?

As far as the logs rotating out... couldn't hobbit look for an
environment variable for the format of the rotated logs...?  The
filenames vary host to host, but on a given host, a quick look at
/var/log tells you what to expect, right? 

Lastly - being someone who couldn't program his way out of a paper
stack, i will now cheekily suggest that on install, hobbit could look at
/var/log and guesstimate the format, and ask for human confirmation (as
it already does for the hobbit user and homedir).

Even if this automated | dream doesn't happen, could it still be set
manually or via config?

--
Rob Munsch
Solutions For Progress IT


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