log monitoring: send email when error occurs

Question

I do have some logfiles from a few applications. What I want to do, is to monitor these logfiles and send an email if an error occurs.

The question is how to do such a thing. I have seen a few tools like Splunk, but they are really expensive (it should cost nothing, or only an initial fee).

I am using java and logback does to logging. So for now i use an SMTP appender which directly sends an email in the case of an error. But the problem is, that I cannot make this approach on all applications / servers.

Any help would be highly appreciated!

Cheers

Answer 1

We are now using logmeister. It's pretty lightweight and simple, but has therefore not too much functionality. I like the tool, but it is not very good at parsing logfiles. However, we just adapted the log message syntax (because there's no impact for us) and everything is fine now.

Answer 2

How much data are you looking at? Splunk is free to use if you have less than 500mb per day.

You could also post process those logs so only errors are logged which would reduce the amount of logs that need to be ingested in Splunk.

Alternatively it shouldn't be hard to put together a script that greps for those errors and sends an email with the sendmail command if your systems are on UNIX.