Doesn't the current bb implementation only monitor log file messages issued during a time period just past (like 30 minutes)?
I like the expression matching idea, but repetitively walking through the whole thing could introduce alot of overhead. It would be beneficial walk backward from the end of the file to a pre-configured point in the past, then scan the messages. Sorry if this is obvious... :)
Henrik Stoerner wrote:
Hi Peter (and anyone else interested),
On Tue, Nov 29, 2005 at 08:26:14PM +0100, Peter Welter wrote:
Since the msgs-check is not available yet in the Hobbit display, I want to make a suggestion to have it enabled relatively easy. I think of two methods:
-1- A client must have read access to the file [client picks out the "interesting" bits]
-2- Your Hobbit server must _also_ be a central loghost. [allows centralized configuration of how to monitor the logs]
I'm not really thrilled with either of these - sorry! Each of them have some drawbacks: The first one moves the configuration of what logs to monitor away from the central hobbit server, and the second one only works for logs that go through the syslog interface. If I want to monitor e.g. an Apache webserver error-log, or the custom logs from a BEA server, solution 2) won't work. I dont see how it can work with logs from a Windows server either. Plus it adds load to the central Hobbit server to deal with all of the logfiles.
So - I think some other solution is needed, and I've been thinking about how to do it. So far it's just ideas - no code. But I believe the log checking has to happen on each client, but controlled by a central configuration. So what I plan to implement is something like this:
- The configuration of what logs to monitor and what strings to look for is maintained on the central Hobbit server, either as an addition to the hobbit-clients.cfg file, or in a separate file - that isn't really important.
- When a client connects and sends in a client-side message, the Hobbit server accepts the client message, but also sends back the current log-check configuration info. By re-using the client connection, the overhead involved in pushing the configuration to each client becomes almost nil.
- When the client has a log-check configuration, it knows what logs to check for what strings, and can include that information in the normal client message it sends back to the Hobbit server. That means the client will need a tool to do the logfile checking; probably using a client-side regular-expression matching tool like "grep". It can either be built into the Hobbit client, or it could just rely on the existing "grep" utility found on the system - this would probably be the simplest to implement.
Regards, Henrik
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