Software for monitoring server events

Looking for an Open Source events monitor/analyser

[Marcus Stafford]

I've got a couple of VPS in the UK and rather than pay a techie to sort through the event logs when something happens I'd rather see what caused the error myself.

I've looked at complicated stuff like Nagios but I need something simple I can install myself and see logs and events in a nice GUI.

Anyone know of such a thing?

Thanks

[bill]

Do you want something that runs on the server, or a 3rd party service?

[Marcus Stafford]

Something that runs on the server. I've got a third-party uptime monitor which is great but doesn't tell me why the server was slow or went down.

[phranque]

welcome to WebmasterWorld, Marcus Stafford!


are you looking to monitor just the web server logs?
or do you also need to monitor db performance, memory usage, cpu load, etc?

[Marcus Stafford]

I'm using Munin for the latter but really just need an event/log monitor.

[phranque]

i'm not sure what you precisely mean by "event".


usually, finding an error involves knowing what time stamp to look for and finding that problem in the access and/or error logs.


many OS distributions include helpful tools, so you might want to explore that avenue.


i haven't tried it, but you might want to look at wtop and logrep.
wtop - "top" for Apache and other webservers, plus powerful log grepping - Google Project Hosting:
http://code.google.com/p/wtop/ [code.google.com]


i typically use general-purpose command line text processing tools to explore the log files like (e)grep, cut, sort, uniq, wc, etc.
i also wrote a script i use to do certain types of analysis.