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Chapter 12: System Log Management and Monitoring
Why You Shouldn’t Configure Swatch Once
and Forget About It
In the same vein, I urge you to not be complacent about Swatch silence. If Swatch’s
actions don’t fire very often, it could be that your system isn’t getting probed or mis-
used very much, but it’s at least as likely that Swatch isn’t casting its net wide
enough. Continue to periodically scan through your logs manually to see if you’re
missing anything, and continue to tweak .swatchrc.
Don’t forget to periodically reconsider the auditing/logging configurations of the
daemons that generate log messages in the first place. Swatch won’t catch events that
aren’t logged at all. Refer to the syslogd(8) manpage for general instructions on man-
aging your syslogd daemon, and the manpages of the various things that log to sys-
log for specific instructions on changing the way they log events.
Some Simple Log-Reporting Tools
Before we leave the topic of logging and log reporting, I should say just a few words
about a less glamorous category of log tools: offline or non-real-time log reporters.
The idea behind these is that periodically reviewing automatically-excerpted parts of
your logfiles, while not as good as monitoring things in real time, is better than
nothing.
Log reporters run ...