The sys admin's daily grind: New logfile tool
Sweet Logger
Just as a craftsman is unlikely to purchase a new angle grinder every month, sys admins are unlikely to change constantly their tried and trusted tools. Columnist Charly Kühnast ditches this conservative philosophy this month, lured by the charms of a new logfile tool.
A system administrator's choice of weapons for dueling with the daily grind is likely to be pretty conservative. For example, Webalizer has been my tool of choice for analyzing web server logs for something approaching eternity. However, there is no shortage of alternatives: AWStats, AWFFull, and others are available for adventurous admins. But, why experiment? The other tools just do the same thing as Webalizer – that is, create intuitive evaluations from web server logs.
I am tempted to be unfaithful, however, if I need a real-time summary, with precision down to a second. Apachetop gives you a line on this, and I wrote about it some time back [1]. Since then, a better tool has hit the market: Go Access [2]. This tool parses the web server logfile, evaluates it up to the present point in time, and displays the results at the command line. Go Access reads typical logfiles in Common Logfile format, but also in Combined Logfile format. If you have something more exotic, you have the option of teaching Go Access how to handle it.
Go Access writes its output continuously. Thus, I can watch the web server work in real time. In the simplest case, you just pass in a single parameter, the path to the logfile, at run time:
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