What logmon does
An important source of information for an IT operations staff is the wide variety of log-files on the systems they maintain. Checking these files manually is a very time-consuming job, and it may also be a challenge for all members of the staff to be able to interpret all types of messages in all types of logs. The Nimsoft Log File monitoring probe (logmon) can simplify the job for the systems operations staff
by:
- Automatically informing about error situations immediately after they have occurred.
- Filtering out the log-file entries that need manual action. Usually the majority of entries in a log-file are not of interest to the daily operations staff. By setting up watchers and filters inlogmon, alarms are generated only for the important log-file messages.
- Specifying a more informative alarm message by modifying the original message text, thus
helping the operations staff to locate and fix the problem more easily, without requiring assistance from the system specialist.
Logmon can be configured to monitor ASCII log-files in any format. Experience has shown that very few log-files have the same layout. Some files are line-oriented (single-line files like the UNIX system log-files /usr/adm/messages), while other log-files are record-oriented (multiple-line files, like the ones produced by Oracle). The logmon probe monitors both line-oriented and record-oriented log-files effectively, using a powerful regular expression and/or pattern-matching scheme. The probe checks
the log-file for new entries at user-configurable, timed intervals, keeping track of the position within the file between each run. This ensures that only one alarm is sent per log-entry, even if the log-file is truncated or wrapped in the meantime.
A single instance of the logmon probe can be configured to monitor multiple log-files. Within each log-file, logmon can be set up to look for occurrences of many different log-file entries with each log-file entries generating a different alarm message, which may contain both text from the original log-file entry and/or user-defined text.
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