I am using Nagios to monitor that a certain number of servers and processes stay online. This works well and I'm happy with it.
However, I would like a consolidated "event log" across the servers that I inherited and now administer. The events are mostly cron jobs, although it would be nice to log events other ways too. This is how most of the cron jobs are set up right now:
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@hourly /backup/myscript.sh | mail -s "Myscript started" [email protected]
What is a better way to get logs from across different servers into one place? Perhaps I could even log into Nagios and click on an "Event Log" tab and see all of these notifications.
This is not a replacement for going through the actual log files generated by the script (stored on the server), just another way to keep an eye on things and look back quickly if something is not working right.
I'm open to suggestions about this and would love to hear the way you do this or best practices.
ps: I should also mention that the reason I'd like to change this is because hundreds of emails per day are being generated and that makes it harder to see when there is a real problem. I guess I would also like the option to log things as "completed" or "errors encountered" or something like that, and then have notification e-mails sent when there is a problem. Maybe I am hoping for too much.