I am looking for a better way to log cronjobs. Most cronjobs tend to spam email or the console, get ignored, or create yet another logfile.
In this case, I have a Nagios NSCA script which sends data to a central Nagios sever. This send_nsca script also prints a single status line to STDOUT, indicating success or failure.
0 * * * * root /usr/local/nagios/sbin/nsca_check_disk
This emails the following message to root@localhost, which is then forwarded to my team of sysadmins. Spam.
forwarded nsca_check_disk: 1 data packet(s) sent to host successfully.
I'm looking for a log method which:
- Doesn't spam the messages to email or the console
- Don't create yet another krufty logfile which requires cleanup months or years later.
- Capture the log information somewhere, so it can be viewed later if desired.
- Works on most unixes
- Fits into an existing log infrastructure.
- Uses common syslog conventions like 'facility'
- Some of these are third party scripts, and don't always do logging internally.
UPDATE 2010-04-30
In the process of writing this question, I think I have answered myself. So I'll answer myself "Jeopardy-style". Is there any problem with this method?
The following will send any Cron output to /usr/bin//logger, which will send to syslog, with a 'tag' of 'nsca_check_disk'. Syslog handles it from there. My systems (CentOS and FreeBSD) already handle log rotation.
*/5 * * * * root /usr/local/nagios/sbin/nsca_check_disk 2>&1 |/usr/bin/logger -t nsca_check_disk
/var/log/messages now has one additional message which says this:
Apr 29, 17:40:00 192.168.6.19 nsca_check_disk: 1 data packet(s) sent to host successfully.
I like /usr/bin/logger , because it works well with an existing syslog configuration and infrastructure, and is included with most Unix distros. Most *nix distributions already do logrotation, and do it well.
