While its great that applications such as Confluence keep track of errors by writing them to the logs, they are generally ignored as there is no convenient way to access them. I set out to solve this problem by writing a script (built on Enchanter) that processes log files on a remote server for any error messages, then creates an RSS feed. Here are a couple feeds I created for some servers I was interested in:
The base Enchanter script that generates these feeds is log4j-rss.bsh. The script generates the RSS feed when activated, so to keep the feed timely, you'd probably want to schedule via a cron or similar tool. I use this script, scheduled via cron, to monitor several Atlassian and Apache servers, and I'm sure it could be useful anywhere else, since it isn't tied to the log format of Confluence, Tomcat, or even Log4J.
3 Comment(s)
This is a great idea, I've done something very similar with IIS logs using .NET
By Tim at March 7, 2007 6:29 PM
Also useful if you are building an app in Java or Groovy is Log4jRss - http://penguin.eskimoman.net/log4rss/. this creates a log4j rss appender with log feed built in
regards
Al
By Al at March 8, 2007 5:10 PM
Check out http://code.google.com/p/rssappender/ , it is also a log4j appender, but instead of logging to files, it embeds a mini http server that serves the feeds directly. It's great for development use.
By Zsolt Szasz at March 15, 2007 12:53 AM