Five Log Monitoring Tools
Learn to Love the Dog
The choice of the appropriate tool massively depends on the specific requirements and your personal programming skills. None of the five candidates can replace a full-scale monitoring system, let alone an intrusion detection system. In any case, administrators need to interpret the sent system events themselves. See the "Old Comrades" box for some other alternatives.
Old Comrades
Anyone searching the Internet for other alternatives to the featured tools will automatically stumble upon a few representatives that are now obsolete. The Logdigest [6] tool works like Logcheck, but has been on ice since 2009. LogSurfer [7] is pretty similar to SwatchDog, but can also group similar events. In addition, LogSurfer is written in C and should therefore work much more quickly. However, the most recent version of the tool was released in September 2011.
Petit [8] is about the same age, but it is still in the repositories of Ubuntu. The tool uses language analysis methods to curb the flood of data, especially in system logs. This allows administrators to, for example, list all words that occur particularly frequently in a logfile. In addition, the tool draws a graph that presents the number of messages in a given period of time (Figure 9). The hash function, which keeps track of similar messages in the log, is also interesting. It allows the viewer to immediately see which errors occur most frequently.
LOGalyze provides a GUI and can also be remotely operated via your browser. However, anyone who wants to use the tool should remember the tool's age. The supplied Tomcat version also needs to be replaced as quickly as possible. Admins also need to be able to figure out for themselves how to use LOGalyze.
Logcheck can be put into operation particularly quickly. Anyone who masters regular expressions can reduce the flood of data using quickly added and customized filtering rules. While Logcheck only sends the naked events to the admin, Logwatch provides the admin with a summary. If admins want to monitor their own services using Logwatch, they need Perl scripts.
MultiTail is worthwhile for administrators who literally want to keep an eye on several logfiles and only want to trigger actions in certain cases. Sending emails and forwarding filtered events may be possible; however, to do so admins need to write suitable regular expressions and manually configure MultiTail. The tool is therefore useful as a very good supplement to Logcheck and Logwatch.
Finally, SwatchDog is comparable to Logwatch: It can be set up quickly but requires knowledge of regular expressions. Additionally, it only reports individual events specified by the administrator.
Infos
- LOGalyze: http://www.logalyze.com
- Logcheck: http://logcheck.alioth.debian.org
- Logwatch: https://sourceforge.net/projects/logwatch/
- MultiTail: https://www.vanheusden.com/multitail/
- SwatchDog: https://sourceforge.net/projects/swatch/
- Logdigest: https://sourceforge.net/projects/logdigest/
- LogSurfer: http://www.crypt.gen.nz/logsurfer/
- Petit: http://crunchtools.com/software/petit/
« Previous 1 2
Buy this article as PDF
(incl. VAT)
Buy Linux Magazine
Subscribe to our Linux Newsletters
Find Linux and Open Source Jobs
Subscribe to our ADMIN Newsletters
Support Our Work
Linux Magazine content is made possible with support from readers like you. Please consider contributing when you've found an article to be beneficial.
News
-
PipeWire 1.0 Officially Released
PipeWire was created to take the place of the oft-troubled PulseAudio and has finally reached the 1.0 status as a major update with plenty of improvements and the usual bug fixes.
-
Rocky Linux 9.3 Available for Download
The latest version of the RHEL alternative is now available and brings back cloud and container images for ppc64le along with plenty of new features and fixes.
-
Ubuntu Budgie Shifts How to Tackle Wayland
Ubuntu Budgie has yet to make the switch to Wayland but with a change in approaches, they're finally on track to making it happen.
-
TUXEDO's New Ultraportable Linux Workstation Released
The TUXEDO Pulse 14 blends portability with power, thanks to the AMD Ryzen 7 7840HS CPU.
-
AlmaLinux Will No Longer Be "Just Another RHEL Clone"
With the release of AlmaLinux 9.3, the distribution will be built entirely from upstream sources.
-
elementary OS 8 Has a Big Surprise in Store
When elementary OS 8 finally arrives, it will not only be based on Ubuntu 24.04 but it will also default to Wayland for better performance and security.
-
OpenELA Releases Enterprise Linux Source Code
With Red Hat restricting the source for RHEL, it was only a matter of time before those who depended on that source struck out on their own.
-
StripedFly Malware Hiding in Plain Sight as a Cryptocurrency Miner
A rather deceptive piece of malware has infected 1 million Windows and Linux hosts since 2017.
-
Experimental Wayland Support Planned for Linux Mint 21.3
As with most Linux distributions, the migration to Wayland is in full force. While some distributions have already made the move, Linux Mint has been a bit slower to do so.
-
Window Maker Live 0.96.0-0 Released
If you're a fan of the Window Maker window manager, there's a new official release of the Linux distribution that champions the old-school user interface.