mtail - extract whitebox monitoring data from application logs for collection into a timeseries database
mtail is a tool for extracting metrics from application logs to be exported
into a timeseries database or timeseries calculator for alerting and
dashboarding.
It aims to fill a niche between applications that do not export their own internal state, and existing monitoring systems, without patching those applications or rewriting the same framework for custom extraction glue code.
The extraction is controlled by mtail programs which define patterns and actions:
# simple line counter
counter line_count
/$/ {
line_count++
}
Metrics are exported for scraping by a collector as JSON or Prometheus format over HTTP, or can be periodically sent to a collectd, StatsD, or Graphite collector socket.
Read the programming guide if you want to learn how to write mtail programs.
Mailing list: https://groups.google.com/forum/#!forum/mtail-users
There are various ways of installing mtail.
Precompiled binaries for released versions are available in the Releases page on Github. Using the latest production release binary is the recommended way of installing mtail.
Windows, OSX and Linux binaries are available.
To build mtail from the source code yourself you need to have a working Go
environment with version 1.9 or greater installed, also some additional tools
like goyacc. You can't go get the software and have it build straight away.
Sorry.
See the Build instructions for more details.
A Dockerfile is included in this repository for local development as an
alternative to installing Go in your environment, and takes care of all the
build dependency installation, if you don't care for that.
mtail works best when it paired with a timeseries-based calculator and
alerting tool, like Prometheus.
So what you do is you take the metrics from the log files and you bring them down to the monitoring system?
It deals with the instrumentation so the engineers don't have to! It has the extraction skills! It is good at dealing with log files!!