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

[Balazs Scheidler]

On Thu, 2010-01-14 at 10:15 +0100, Balazs Scheidler wrote:
> 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.
> 

This happened sooner than I thought, so I'm happy to tell everyone that
both the pdbtool colorization stuff, and syslog-ng-ctl were integrated
to syslog-ng OSE 3.1 tree.

And I'd be really happy if I could get some 3.1 related feedback,
positive or negative both appreciated. So if you have only a little
time, it'd be great if you could:

  * just compile syslog-ng in your environment, to make sure we didn't
break any of the supported platforms
  * try it with your favourite configuration file, did we break
something?
  * putting it under some real-world stress would be a real benefit

The first two things would only take minutes assuming you compiled
syslog-ng yourself and you still have the environment.

I hope to get this released without the "beta" tag rather sooner than
later.

Thanks for any help.


-- 
Bazsi