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

Installation

mtail uses a Makefile. To build mtail, type make at the commandline. See the Build instructions for more details.

Deployment

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!!