[olug] Splunk and log scraping

T. J. Brumfield enderandrew at gmail.com
Fri Dec 18 01:40:24 UTC 2009


I was looking at Splunk, and they were quoting us a price of over
$300,000 per year just for our team to use it. It looks useful, but I
just can't see justifying the price.

We want a tool to filter through logs to help us get right down to the
most relevant data. Anyone can manually grep through logs from time to
time, but it would be nice to automate this process.

We're currently looking a solution to start pointing about 3 gigs of
logs per day (for one group of users, from one app) to a central
place, to filter those logs and look for problems. Splunk was the
first thing we looked at, but I assume there are alternatives. I'm
trying to get my employer to start looking at and considering some
OSS, since we're almost entirely a Microsoft company (corporate wide)
even when vendors encourage otherwise. I was hoping there might be a
good OSS alternative.

There are a lot of SysAdmins on this group. I can't be the first one
on this list who has needed a log scraping solution.

-- T. J.

On Thu, Dec 17, 2009 at 4:41 PM, Irish <irish.masms at gmail.com> wrote:
> On Thu, Dec 17, 2009 at 3:06 PM, Kevin <sharpestmarble at gmail.com> wrote:
>
>> From what I remember, Splunk does log mining. "Look at your logs, what
>> is there interesting?" I haven't used it, though, and all that is
>> coming just from a combination of the ads I saw and what does an app
>> like that do.
>>
>> I don't know what TJ's research has turned up, nor do I know what he's
>> trying to accomplish.
>>
>
> I've been using Slunk for about 1.5 years now - not a bad tool for log
> management IMHO. Point all your systems logs to the Splunk server, get a
> 'google like' interface to those logs. Good for giving access to those
> network, desktop, & server admins to help troubleshoot issues - and look for
> the miscreants on your network.
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