Splunk
We’ve talked a bit about the merits of having some sort of centralised logging system. I’d typically been thinking of syslog-ng feeding into an SQL database with a basic web interface on top, but today the boss pointed me at this post by Ben Rockwood which does what the Splunk website does not: it tells you what Splunk does and why it is useful.
Thus enthused, I grabbed the free version and had it up and running in literally five minutes. This is just slurping log files from the local host, but that’s still pretty nice. The interface is genuinely useful, and I can see enough merit to the extra features the commercial version provides (multiple user accounts, multiple indexes, monitoring) to at least put forward a case for giving them money, though at US$5k for a 500MB/day license it’s not what I’d call cheap.
Anyway, I know what I’m doing for the rest of the week!
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