Generic Uses

We've talked a lot about web logging. Web logs are important in their own way; however, a smoothly running architecture has a plethora of logs encompassing just about every possible aspect of the system.

If you log in to a server that you don't pay much attention to and spend about 15 minutes poring over the various logs on the machine, you are almost guaranteed to find something out of line. Modern UNIX and Windows deployments have so many moving parts that it is easy to lose track. Centralized logging can provide a single portal through which the normal day-to-day operations can be audited.

When a machine begins to exhibit unexpected behavior, the first thing that any systems engineer (developer, DBA, network admin, systems admin) will do is log in and look around. However, if the machine is truly misbehaving, we often find ourselves unable to access it; but, you could access the logs, if they were being written elsewhere.

To any seasoned systems admin, I'm describing all the benefits of using syslog to log events to a remote logging server. I hope that reading the previous sections of this chapter enlightened you regarding what can be accomplished when logging is performed via a multiple-subscriber communications medium such as Spread.