What are good open-source log monitoring tools on Linux ?
In an operating system, logs are all about keeping track of events, be it critical system errors, resource usage warnings, transaction history, application status, or user activities. These logs, which are stored as (text or binary) files in the system, are useful for system auditing, debugging and maintenance. However, with so many different system entities generating log files, and even at growing rate, the challenge as a system admin is to how to « consume » these log files effectively.
That’s when log monitoring tools come into the picture, which streamline the often laborious process of collecting, parsing and analyzing log files, as well as alerting system admins for any interesting events. These tools are designed from ground up focused on log monitoring, so they offer many attractive features, such as scalable log aggregation and filtering, human-readable display, event correlation, visual or email notification, flexible log retention policy, and so on.
In this post, I am going to introduce a list of popular open-source log monitoring software for Linux, ranging from simple log file viewers to full-blown log monitoring frameworks.
Log Aggregation and Filtering
Log monitoring would not be possible without efficient and scalable mechanisms to collect and pre-process log files. Tools in this category focus on shipping, collecting, filtering, indexing and storing log files, so that they can be further analyzed and visualized in subsequent monitoring pipelines.
1. rsyslog: an open-source log collector server which can filter and consolidate log data (based on syslog protocol) from different hosts and devices in the network. rsyslog can be configured as a server or a client, where the former plays the role of a log collector and the latter runs as a log sender.
2. syslog-ng: another open-source implementation of the syslog protocol with more advanced and user-friendly features such as content-based filtering, easier-to-understand config format, and real-time event correlation.
3. systemd journal: systemd journal can be configured for remote journal logging, where locally logged events are forwarded to a remote server over HTTP. In this setup, systemd-journal-upload on a client host serializes and forwards journal messages to systemd-journal-remote running on a remote collector server.
4. logstash: an open-source tool that collects, parses, and stores log files for offline search and analysis. logstash can run in various pipelines due to many plugins supporting different input/output interfaces, decoding/encoding, and filtering rules. Input plugins allows logstash to gather log files from different sources and protocols (e.g., files, S3, RabbitMQ, syslog, collectd, TCP/UDP sockets). Filter/codec plugins are used to parse, convert, modify and add metadata to log files. Output plugins pass processed log files to various target storages (e.g., file, Google cloud storage, Nagios, S3, Zabbix).
5. collectd: a daemon service which gathers various system-level statistics, and stores them for historical analysis or real-time graphing. Similar to logstash, collectd is an extensible architecture, where you can enable various input/output plugins to change its collection behaviors. For log collection, collectd can leverage LogFile and Network plugins to aggregate remote log files.
6. Logster: an open-source utility for parsing log files for any interesting data, and aggregating extracted data into metrics for subsequent reporting and graphing pipelines.
7. Fluentd: a unified log aggregation layer which allows in-stream processing for a variety of streaming data and log files. It comes with a huge plugin ecosystem with more than 300 plugins to support various input sources and output interfaces.
8. Nxlog: a unified log collector and forwarder which supports a variety of log sources, formats and protocols. Advanced features include multi-threaded log collection and processing, message buffering and prioritization, built-in log rotation, and TLS/SSL transport.
9. Scribe:: a scalable log collector server developed by Facebook. Scribe can aggregate log data which is streamed in real time from a large number of clients. It uses Apache Thrift for protocol encoding, so its interface is compatible with pretty much any languages. While a proven solution, Scribe is not something you can deploy quickly as a turnkey. Also, note that Scribe is no longer updated and maintained.
10. Flume: a highly scalable and reliable service to transport and collect large volumes of streaming log data from any clients, and store them in backend storage such as Apache Hadoops’ HDFS.
As a Linux sysadmin it feels great power when monitoring system resources like cpu, memory on the commandline. To peek inside the system is a good habit here atleast, because that’s one way of driving your Linux system safe. Plenty of tools like Htop, Nmon, Collectl, top and iotop etc help you accomplish the task. Today lets try another tool called Glances.
