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Linux is a family of open source Unix-like operating systems based on the Linux kernel, an operating system kernel first released on September 17, 1991 by Linus Torvalds. Linux is typically packaged in a Linux distribution (or distro for short).

Distributions include the Linux kernel and supporting system software and libraries, many of which are provided by the GNU Project. Many Linux distributions use the word "Linux" in their name, but the Free Software Foundation uses the name GNU/Linux to emphasize the importance of GNU software, causing some controversy.

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How do you deal with the logs on your servers? (lemmy.ml)

submitted 1 year ago by [email protected] to c/[email protected]

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I'm pretty new to selfhosting, but one thing that I know to take seriously is log collection. Since there are a lot of different type of logs (kernel log, application logs, etc) and logs come in many different formats (binary, json, strings) - it's no easy task to collect them centrally and look through them whenever neccessarly.

I've looked at grafana and tried the agent briefly, but it wasn't as easy as I thought (and it might be a too big tool for my needs). So I thought to ask the linuxlemmy community to get some inspiration.

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[–] [email protected] 12 points 1 year ago (1 children)

For a bit enhanced log file viewing, you could use something like lnav, I think it's packaged for most distributions.

Cockpit can be useful for journald, but personally I think GUI stuff is a bit clunky for logs.

Grep, awk and sed are powerful tools, even with only basic knowledge of them. Vim in readonly mode is actually quite effective for single files too.

For aggregating multiple servers' logs good ol' rsyslog is good, but not simple to set up. There are tutorials online.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) (1 children)

Holy guacamole this (edit: lnav) is pretty good! Probably does not solve collection of logs from multiple systems, but for local inspection (or after having files copied elsewhere) it seems to be a real powertool

[–] [email protected] 4 points 1 year ago

Rsyslog to collect logs to a single server, then lnav for viewing them on that server is a good combo. Oldschool but very effective for self-host scale.

Glad the tip was useful!