Instrument log file parsing software

Raw data, graphs, and other visualizations can be written out to files or used to generate reports. Standard reports can be scheduled to run periodically, so creating a filter by date and setting it to run daily and output to a plain text file would give you exactly the same results that you used to get from Cronolog.

The benefit of using Kibana is that it can give much more assistance than Cronolog could. You can compare data from different sources and visualize the information from all of your system log files to analyze performance and forecast capacity requirements. To get a full data management facility, you should probably use Logstash to collate source data, Elasticsearch to sort data, and Kibana to display results.

Kibana has plenty of data sourcing and manipulation facilities so that it could be used as a standalone data analysis tool. Graylog is a free, open-source log file-based system that can give you a lot more functionality than just a log archiving utility. This log management facility can work with any logs.

You can feed data into it from other sources by channeling system reports into a file, thus creating your own logs. Action scripts can forward log data to the screen, to other logs, or on to other applications. The dashboard shows data in the form of histograms, pie charts, line graphs, and color-coded lists. The interface includes a search and query function, which allows you to filter log records to get information on specific types of events or specific sources.

Those overall views of data are not your only option because you can drill down and see the detailed records that created a summary. This makes Graylog a data mining tool. Alert conditions can be customized, and you can write actions to be performed in the event of alerts arising. These actions include executing scripts or notifying specific team members by email or by Slack message. This is an amazing and very comprehensive tool that can automate your log file processing and automatically execute fault resolution.

The two essential elements of Cronolog are that it could split up log files by date and that it could be run automatically. XpoLog includes both those functions. This is an excellent improvement on Cronolog, however, because XpoLog includes a lot of other functionality. It is a vast improvement on that discontinued log parsing tool.

The utility can be installed on Mac OS X The log management software can also be installed on Linux Kernel 2.

Apart from straightforward log file management, the XpoLog analysis engine detects unauthorized file access and helps optimize application and hardware usage. XpoLog gathers data from selected sources and will monitor those files that you include in its scope. Once data is centralized, XpoLog merges all data sources and creates its own database of records.

Those records can be searched and filtered for analysis, and results can be written out to files. That functionality offers the same file parsing as Cronolog.

Results can be written out to files or retained as archives for viewing through the XpoLog dashboard. XpoLog is available for free. If you just want to split up your Apache log files, then the free version will be good enough.

To deal with larger volumes of data and employ the system for analysis, then you might have to step up to one of the paid plans. The free version allows you to process up to 1 GB of data per day, and the system will retain that data for five days.

You could always write out the records to text files to get around that five day limit. You get progressively larger daily data throughput allowances at each price point. You have to pay for the service annually in advance, even though it has a monthly price.

You can also buy a perpetual license. The program is specifically designed to manage Apache web server logs. Managelogs has different operating modes activated by the variables specified when launching the program. You can set the utility to archive log files by date , or you can specify a maximum file size, which will copy over the log file to a new name and then clear out the current log file so it can start again from scratch and build up new records.

Although there are plenty of clever things you can do with regular expressions and pattern matching to pick out records for a specific date, the easiest way to get log archives per day is to write a copy script and then schedule it to run at midnight.

If the last instructions in the script remove the existing file, new records will accumulate in a separate file throughout the day, to be archived off again at midnight. Cronolog was not that great, and you could quite easily write your own version in just a couple of minutes. Log management utilities are very useful and despite the limited capabilities of Cronolog, many systems administrators came to rely on its services. Every one of the recommendations in our list of Cronolog replacements can be used or tried for free.

All of these facilities give you better service than the do-it-yourself replication of Cronolog. Try out any of these tools and see which of them gives you the extra features needed to improve log and facilities management. Log aggregation combines log files from different sources so that they can be unified for analysis. Different logging systems deploy individual file formats, so log aggregators need to convert log file contents into a unified format.

Once all files have the same record layout, they can be submitted together to analytical tools for sorting, searching, filtering, and summarizing.

One of the main sources of application logs is the Windows Event system. These are very easy to collect in Windows environments. Log files and event messages get generated by most applications and operating systems but most people ignore them.

You can get a lot of information about the operations of your IT infrastructure if you pay attention to these messages and if you want security standard accreditation, you need to have a comprehensive log management policy. Centralized log management requires you to collect all log files and store them in one place.

Many businesses use cloud storage for this activity. Aggregating logs for analysis is also a good idea. A log management plan needs a strategy. You need to grade the log message sources in order of importance. Next, all log files need to be standardized and stored centrally. A log file analyzer will help you to get useful information from your logs. Look for a log managing package that will support all of these log management activities. I suggest you to add Motadata log management in your list.

This site uses Akismet to reduce spam. Learn how your comment data is processed. Comparitech uses cookies. More info. Menu Close. We are reader supported and may receive a commission when you make purchases using the links on our site. You can also easily define hot keys and buttons to send serial commands to your device or perform other tasks. You can even input the device data directly to a chart or use Excel's built-in functions to peform real-time analysis.

I love this program! It has saved me hours of research and programming time! Well worth it! Much appreciated.

Improve this question. Dane Balia Dane Balia 1 1 gold badge 2 2 silver badges 11 11 bronze badges. Sounds like an okay implementation to me. You might want to send this question off to the codereview stackexchange instead. Add a comment. Active Oldest Votes. Improve this answer. Neil Neil If it works, then it's good enough. The only problems I see with this solution is two-fold: What happens if someone edits the log file?

The java program will ignore these changes. Nur Zincir-Heywood, Evangelos E. Patterson, Michael I. Oliner, Jon Stearley. Additional Logs We have some links to additional log datasets that are related to security research.

License The log datasets are freely available for research purposes. About A large collection of system log datasets for AI-powered log analytics Topics log-analysis logs console-log datasets anomaly-detection log-parsing unstructured-logs. Releases No releases published. Packages 0 No packages published. Contributors 3. You signed in with another tab or window.