jouno: Journal notifications forwarder

A Systemd-Journal viewer with Freedesktop Notifications forwarding including burst-handling and filtering.

Description

Jouno is a GUI Systemd-Journal monitoring and viewing tool. Jouno can filter and bundle messages for forwarding to the desktop as standard DBUS Freedesktop Notifications (most linux desktop environments present DBUS Notifications as popup messages). Jouno's feature set includes:

• Journal live-view.
  • Overview table with live view incremental-search and select.
  • Double-click access to the all 50+ journal entry fields, including easy cut and paste.
  • Configurable history length, configurable full or filtered view.
• Journal forwarding.
  • Forwarding of filtered messages to the desktop as DBUS-notifications.
  • Journal message-burst bundling to minimise desktop notifications.
  • Controls and options to enable/disable forwarding.
  • Optional forwarding of the xorg-session.log or wayland-session.log to the systemd-journal (consolidated desktop logging).
• Filtering
  • Filtering to include or exclude messages.
  • Plain-text and regular-expression filtering.
  • Easy filter creation from any selected journal entry.
  • Filters may be edited, deleted, reordered, or selectively enabled or disabled.
  • Filter editing feedback via incremental-search of past journal entries as you edit.
  • Filters are saved to the config file and reloaded at startup.
• Journal query interface
  • View/query current and past boots
  • Boot timeline calendar marked with boots, shutdowns, and shutdowns with incomplete journals (crashes).
  • Query refinement criteria including _BOOT_ID, _UID, _GID, QT_CATEGORY, SYSLOG_IDENTIFIER, _COM, _EXE, and _HOSTNAME (with helpful displays of values that actually occur in the journal).
  • Efficient queries using sd-journal API (via python systemd-journal)
• User interface and configuration
  • Panels undock for maximised or customised viewing.
  • Customised panel and window geometries are saved across application-restart and panel-docking.
  • Dynamic (no restart) support for desktop theme changes, including light/dark theme switching.
  • An option to run minimised in the system-tray with a quick-access tray context-menu.
  • Full configuration UI, editing of config INI files is not required.
  • If Config INI files are externally edited, the changes are automatically reloaded without requiring a restart.

jouno is a tool designed to improve awareness of background activity by monitoring the journal and raising interesting journal-entries as desktop notifications. Possibilities for it use include:

• Monitoring specific jobs, such as the progress of the daily backups.
• Watching for specific events, such as background core dumps.
• Investigating desktop actions that raise journal log entries.
• Discovering unnecessary daemon activity and unnecessary services.
• Notifying access attempts, such as su, ssh, samba, or pam events.
• Prevention of adverse desktop activity, such as shutting down during the backups.
• Detecting hardware events.
• Providing timer and cron jobs with a simple way to raise desktop notifications.
• Raising general awareness of what is going on in the background.

I've also written a gist called notify-desktop. I use notify-desktop in root-owned timer-jobs so the jobs can raise notifications with the current desktop user. While notify-desktop helps keep me informed about the status of jobs I've written, jouno allows me to watch for and monitor all journaled activities. My own jobs might now use more standard logging tools such as logger and systemd-cat and rely on jouno to raise any desktop notifications.

Getting Started

To get started with jouno, you only need to download the jouno.py python script and check that the dependencies described below are in place.

Dependencies

All the following runtime dependencies are likely to be available pre-packaged on any modern Linux distribution (jouno was originally developed on OpenSUSE Tumbleweed).

• python 3.8: jouno is written in python and may depend on some features present only in 3.8 onward.
• python 3.8 QtPy: the python GUI library used by jouno.
• python 3.8 systemd: python module for native access to the systemd facilities.
• python 3.8 dbus: python module for dbus used for issuing notifications
• Freedesktop theme icons: these are normally installed by default on any Linux desktop. The application may look different under different desktop themes. It was developed on a system that is set to the OpenSUSE Tumbleweed default theme.

Dependency installation on OpenSUSE::

    zypper install python38-QtPy python38-systemd python38-dbus-python

If you want to be able to read all of a system's journal entries you will need to be a member of the Linux systemd-journal group.

Installing

As previously stated, the jouno.py script is only file required beyond the prerequisites. There are also OpenSUSE and Fedora rpm's available at: https://software.opensuse.org/package/jouno

The current options for installation are the following:

1. The script can be run without installation by using a python interpreter, for example:

   % python3 jouno.py
   

2. The script can be self installed as desktop application in the current user's desktop menu as Applications->System->jouno by running:

    % python3 jouno.py --install
   

   Depending on which desktop you're running menu changes may require logout before they become visible.

3. A system-wide installation, download the RPM from the above link, then use rpm to install it:

   sudo rpm --install jouno-1.0.3-3.1.noarch.rpm
   

   The rpm will install the following files:

    /usr/bin/jouno
    /usr/share/applications/jouno.desktop
    /usr/share/icons/jouno.png
    /usr/share/licenses/jouno
    /usr/share/licenses/jouno/LICENSE.md
   

Executing the program

• If installed by the current user via the --install option, jouno should be in the current user's application menu under System. The jouno command will be in $HOME/bin. If $HOME/bin is on the user's PATH, jouno will be able to be run from the command line:

  % jouno
  

• If the script has not been installed, it can still be run on the command line via the python interpreter, for example:

  % python3 jouno.py
  

Help

Detailed help can be accessed by using the right mouse-button to bring up a context-menu or --help on the command line. Access to the context-menu is available via a right-mouse click in both the application-window and the system-tray icon.

Accessories

A suggested accessory is KDE Connect. If you enabled the appropriate permissions on your phone, KDE Connect can forward desktop notifications to the phone. Use Jouno to forward Systemd-Journal messages to Desktop-Notifications, and use KDE Connect to forward them to your phone.

Issues

KDE kwin-compositing has an ongoing CPU/responsiveness issue for notifications that are set to expire (bug 436240). If this proves to be a problem, the jouno option notification_seconds can be set to zero, in which case popup messages won't expire and will remain visible until dismissed.

Development

At this time there is only one real source file, jouno.py

My IDE for this project is PyCharm Community Edition.

My development Linux desktop is OpenSUSE Tumbleweed. The python3 interpreter and python3 libraries are from the standard OpenSUSE Tumbleweed repositories (Tumbleweed currently defaults python3 to python 3.8).

Authors

Michael Hamilton
m i c h a e l @ a c t r i x . g e n . n z

Version History

See GitHub

License

This project is licensed under the GNU General Public License Version 3 - see the LICENSE.md file for details

jouno Copyright (C) 2021 Michael Hamilton

This program is free software: you can redistribute it and/or modify it under the terms of the GNU General Public License as published by the Free Software Foundation, version 3.

This program is distributed in the hope that it will be useful, but WITHOUT ANY WARRANTY; without even the implied warranty of MERCHANTABILITY or FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE. See the GNU General Public License for more details.

You should have received a copy of the GNU General Public License along with this program. If not, see https://www.gnu.org/licenses/.

Acknowledgments

• pyqt
• Systemd Journal
• Freedesktop Notifications