Re: [logs] Generic Log Message Parsing Tool

From: Rajkumar S. (listuserat_private)
Date: Mon Jun 10 2002 - 08:25:03 PDT

  • Next message: William D. Colburn (aka Schlake): "Re: [logs] Generic Log Message Parsing Tool"

    Hello,
    
    I have been following this discussion with great interest. Here are some
    random questions and ideas that came up in my mind. All this might be
    absolute rubbish, so please be gentle ;)
    
    How are we going to parse logs that represent a single event in multiple
    lines. For example the case of qmail where for an event "an email
    send" generates multiple entries in logs. This gets more interesting when
    we have a central log collector for multiple qmail servers in the network.
    
    I imagine this parser tool to convert all the logs (the actual text
    strings) in the network to some sort of events, that can be later
    analyzed. I imagine an event as, well an event, with some parameters :)
    For example, the event "an email send" will have parameters like from
    addr, to addr and size. An event "a web page accessed" will have
    parameters size, url and who accessed it, etc...
    
    The events have to be some sort of normalized log messages which are
    platform and daemon independent. I am waiting for Tina'a mail for more
    info on this. These events can be fed into database or xml etc for further
    processing like anomaly detection or mundane analysis like the MB of data
    transmitted via email.
    
    Can we have a configuration file, rather a collection of files like the
    logrotate.d where we can drop in the config file for each daemon. This
    will enable us to mix and match the set of daemons that we want to parse
    according to our setup rather than to have a single file. Each file in the
    logparse.d will have complete info for a single daemon.
    
    As a corollary to this will it be possible to assign the config file and
    the corresponding engine using a main syslog.conf style conf file.
    
    For example
    
    host1.mail.*                    qmail.parser
    host2.mail.*                    sendmail.parser
    
    
    Btw, I have some students who are interested to work on some thing like
    this. If we can hammer out a neat spec for the log tool I can assign this
    to them.
    
    raj
    
    
    
    
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