Easy way to view Log Files

theduncan · June 2014

I cant be the first person to think about this.

I have a growing number of vps's and dedicated servers, and I have found some nice monitoring services, so I can keep on top of problem servers. mostly run away processes, or when a process dies, I can see something happened based on cpu / memory usage.

I have started to pay more attention to some of my log files, notably nginx. ( currently I use logwatcher, and get a email once a day, but the they are growing in size to the point where I pay little attention to most of them ).

Does anyone know of a nicer way to keep on top of log files, so I could see what is happening in real time across multiple servers? and search logs?

neroux · June 2014

Splunk would be the first I could think of.

NickM · June 2014

Set up an rsyslog server with a database backend (I use PostgreSQL, just because I wanted to get some experience with it), and configure all of your servers to forward syslog entries to that server. The most recent mainline release of nginx allows for sending logs to syslog now (it was previously an nginx Plus only feature). Then install LogAnalyzer, which allows you to filter by host, log facility, severity, etc.