syslog

a few weeks ago, i wrote a short article about the advantages of using syslog for all your logging needs. syslog is the standard logging solution for *nix platforms and integrates into virtually all application servers, network devices, and programming languages.

it is often important for system administrators to get real time notification of critical events. unfortunately, it isn't immediately obvious how to do this in the syslog framework. in this article i show you step-by-step how to do this.

as you probably know, syslog is a *nix logging subsystem, typically used for system logging and kernel message trapping. you might not know that it's also an good tool for application logging, including large distributed systems. it has been around since the dawn of time and has very broad language, application and device support. here's a quick how-to to get you started, with debian etch examples.