[syslog-ng] slngctl: syslog-ng debug, trace and statistics utility

[Balazs Scheidler]

On Thu, 2010-01-07 at 15:59 +0100, Christophe Brocas wrote:
> ILLES, Marton a écrit :
> > Hi,
> >
> > PZolee wrote a quite lengthy blog post on troubleshooting and debuging
> > syslog-ng [1] back in December 2009. It popped into my mind that running
> > syslog-ng with debug/trace/verbose option enabled is very handy, but
> > sometimes you do not want to stop syslog-ng just to restart it in a more
> > verbose mode. My idea was to enable syslog-ng to real-time modify these
> > verbosity settings through the control socket which is currently only
> > used for exporting statistical information.
> >
> > I extended the control socket communication to have the ability of
> > modify these logging settings. To make life easier I have created a
> > small utility called slngctl which can be used to communicate with the
> > running syslog-ng process. Using slngctl it also easy to query the
> > statistics collected by syslog-ng. Also on longer term I think other
> > useful small features could be added the slngctl.
> >
> > slngctl commands:
> >
> > marci at octane:$ slngctl
> > Possible commands are:
> >     stats        Dump syslog-ng statistics
> >     verbose      Enable/query verbose messages
> >     debug        Enable/query debug messages
> >     trace        Enable/query trace messages
> >
> > [...]
> >   
> switch the verbose level without restarting server > very interesting
> feature which I would have used yesterday (If i have this command !)
> during a support session with a sysadmin of my company !
> 
> > As always you can find the source code in my 3.1 git repository and all
> > feedbacks are very welcome.
> >
> > best,
> >
> > Marton
> >
> > PS: I know slngctl might not be the best name, so I offer a bier to
> > anyone suggesting a better name when visiting us in Budapest,
> > Hungary. :)
> >   
> May be as for named (named-checkzone, named-checkconf) or apache 2
> (a2ensite, a2dissite, a2enmod, a2dismod), a command by functionnality
> may be more readable : syslogng-trace / syslogng-stats etc.

Thanks for this functionality. I'm going to integrate this into OSE 3.1
as it doesn't affect the stability of the main syslog-ng binary. I guess
I'm going to name this "syslog-ng-ctl" as I don't like abbreviating
syslog-ng into slng and we lack a common prefix for our binaries
(syslog-ng, pdbtool, loggen, lgstool...)

Hope I get to integrate this soon.

-- 
Bazsi