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Linux is a family of open source Unix-like operating systems based on the Linux kernel, an operating system kernel first released on September 17, 1991 by Linus Torvalds. Linux is typically packaged in a Linux distribution (or distro for short).

Distributions include the Linux kernel and supporting system software and libraries, many of which are provided by the GNU Project. Many Linux distributions use the word "Linux" in their name, but the Free Software Foundation uses the name GNU/Linux to emphasize the importance of GNU software, causing some controversy.

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How do you deal with the logs on your servers? (lemmy.ml)

submitted 1 year ago by [email protected] to c/[email protected]

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I'm pretty new to selfhosting, but one thing that I know to take seriously is log collection. Since there are a lot of different type of logs (kernel log, application logs, etc) and logs come in many different formats (binary, json, strings) - it's no easy task to collect them centrally and look through them whenever neccessarly.

I've looked at grafana and tried the agent briefly, but it wasn't as easy as I thought (and it might be a too big tool for my needs). So I thought to ask the linuxlemmy community to get some inspiration.

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[–] [email protected] 13 points 1 year ago (1 children)

Honestly? I just ignore them. Something seems to be happening to them, as they're not growing infinitely, but no idea why.

It was a bit complicated to set this up, but it took me almost no time at all.

[–] markstos 1 points 1 year ago (1 children)

Ah yes, I’ve answered a number of support questions from people who have used this method and don’t understand why their app quit working.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) (1 children)

I haven't done the math, but I can count the times a service stopped working and I had to delve into the log files on one hand. The most difficult part usually is setting them up, and as soon as that's done, usually they keep running indefinitely. I'm relatively sure that researching ways to "properly" handle log files, visualizing them, actually setting it up etc, is much much more time investment than the few times that stuff actually breaks and you'd need any of that and it saves any time.

At least for personal stuff. For more critical services, of course it makes sense.

[–] markstos 1 points 1 year ago

On modern Linux servers, often logs are setup by default to go to the systemd journal, where they be queried by the service name. There are no extra steps, except to review the logs when something breaks.

When I’m helping someone troubleshoot, that’s the first question I ask: what do the logs say?