Hands-On Infrastructure Monitoring with Prometheus

Deployment

In our static infrastructure test environment, we can validate the configuration of mtail by connecting to the target01 instance as shown here:

cd ./chapter06/vagrant ssh target01

Then checking the configuration of the provided systemd unit file as shown in the following command:

vagrant@target01:~$ systemctl cat mtail-exporter

As in this example, mtail is counting the lines of the syslog file so it needs to have proper permissions to access system logs, and thus, we run the mtail daemon with Group=adm to make this work. We can see all the required arguments for the mtail service in the following snippet from the unit file, including the path to the line count program:

...Group=admExecStart=/usr/bin/mtail -address 0.0.0.0 -port ...