Friday, 16 September 2016

Monitoring service logs with logwatch

Logwatch is a utility that can be used to create an aggregated/filtered view of loges from various sources & format the data into a neat report in html format (text option also available). The logwatch configuration file can be configured to save this report as a file on the system or email it to users mentioned in the configuration file.

The installation is fairly straightforward. Logwatch installs as a single rpm:

[root@centdb ~]# yum install logwatch
Loaded plugins: fastestmirror, refresh-packagekit, security
Setting up Install Process
Loading mirror speeds from cached hostfile
Resolving Dependencies
--> Running transaction check
---> Package logwatch.noarch 0:7.3.6-52.el6 will be installed
--> Finished Dependency Resolution

Dependencies Resolved

======================================================================================================================================
 Package                         Arch                          Version                              Repository                   Size
======================================================================================================================================
Installing:
 logwatch                        noarch                        7.3.6-52.el6                         test                        302 k

Transaction Summary
======================================================================================================================================
Install       1 Package(s)

Total download size: 302 k
Installed size: 1.3 M
Is this ok [y/N]: y
Downloading Packages:
Running rpm_check_debug
Running Transaction Test
Transaction Test Succeeded
Running Transaction
Warning: RPMDB altered outside of yum.
  Installing : logwatch-7.3.6-52.el6.noarch                                                                                       1/1
  Verifying  : logwatch-7.3.6-52.el6.noarch                                                                                       1/1

Installed:
  logwatch.noarch 0:7.3.6-52.el6

Complete!


The main configuration file is /etc/logwatch/conf/logwatch.conf. By default this file is empty & the default configuration file used is /usr/share/logwatch/default.conf/logwatch.conf.

The configuration file I used while writing this article is given below:

Detail = Med
Range = Today
Service = All
Output = html
save = /var/log/logwatch/report.html

We can then schedule logwatch command to run periodically as a cron job. I scheduled the job to run every 2 minutes.

*/2 * * * * /usr/sbin/logwatch

If we need to generate a specific logwatch report without modifying the configuration file then the parameters mentioned in the example logwatch.conf file can be specified on the command line as follows:

logwatch --detail 10 --range today --service sshd  --output html --save /var/tmp/dev1.html

The output report looks like the screens hot given below:

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