metalog - an alternative syslog daemon

NAME SYNTAX DESCRIPTION OPTIONS SIGNALS FILES AUTHORS SEE ALSO

Metalog is a modern replacement for syslogd and klogd. The logged messages can be dispatched according to their facility, urgency, program name and/or Perl−compatible regular expressions. Log files can be automatically rotated when they exceed a certain size or age. External shell scripts (ex: mail) can be launched when specific patterns are found.

Logs are written according to RFC3164, RFC5423 or a minimal format with optional severity levels.

It can send its logs to remote syslog servers via UDP. It can gather info from the kernel or /dev/log as well as from several Unix Domain Sockets. This allows logging from chrooted or containerized applications.

Metalog is easier to configure than syslogd and syslog−ng, accepts unlimited number of rules and has (switchable) memory bufferisation for maximal performance.

OPTIONS

−a, −−async

Improve performance by using buffers (bug log files won’t get updated in real time). Can be overridden for individual logs.

−B, −−daemonize

Have the server start in background (daemonization).

−c, −−consolelevel=0..7

Set the console log level (Linux only).

−C, −−configfile=file

Use an alternate configuration file.

−g, −−group=group

Change the GID of the metalog process. Created files will be owned by this group.

−h, −−help

Output help information and exit.

−N, −−no−kernel

Do not attempt to log messages from the kernel.

−P, −−pidfile=file

Use an alternate file to store the process number.

−s, −−sync, −−synchronous

Start in synchronous mode, with no bufferization. Can be overridden for individual logs.

−t, −−test-config

Exit after parsing the config file(s). Returns 0 if config is ok.

−v, −−verbose

Run in verbose mode (useful for debugging behavior).

−V, −−version

Display metalog version information.

SIGNALS

SIGUSR1

Enable synchronous mode.

SIGUSR2

Disable synchronous mode.

FILES

Note that the exact paths depend on the build settings. These are the standard paths.

/etc/metalog.conf
/var/run/metalog.pid
/dev/log

AUTHORS

Mike Frysinger <[email protected]>
Laurent Wandrebeck (low) <[email protected]>
Leo Lipelis <[email protected]>
Hendrik Visage <[email protected]>
Frank DENIS (Jedi/Sector One) <[email protected]>