Ever have an exchange like this? Q: What happened on this service? A: We can’t keep logs on the server past 2 months. Those logs are gone. Just about every IaaS out there has an object store. Amazon offers S3 and OpenStack providers have Swift. Why not just point logrotate at one of those object stores? That’s just what I’ve done with Swiftrotate. It’s a simple shell script to use with logrotate....
grep is a wonderful tool for digging through logs on specific issues, but there are a few cases when people misuse it and claim the logs don’t have the answers when grep didn’t yield an answer. Here’s an example of Rails application logging from Ruby on Rails Guides: Processing PostsController#create (for 127.0.0.1 at 2008-09-08 11:52:54) [POST] Session ID: BAh7BzoMY3NyZl9pZCIlMDY5MWU1M2I1ZDRjODBlMzkyMWI1OTg2NWQyNzViZjYiCmZsYXNoSUM6J0FjdGl vbkNvbnRyb2xsZXI6OkZsYXNoOjpGbGFzaEhhc2h7AAY6CkB1c2VkewA=--b18cd92fba90eacf8137e5f6b3b06c4d724596a4 Parameters: {"commit"=>"Create", "post"=>{"title"=>"Debugging Rails", "body"=>"I'm learning how to print in logs!...