[HN Gopher] Show HN: Simple Log Alerts to Slack
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       Show HN: Simple Log Alerts to Slack
        
       There are many log alerting systems on the market. The best known
       is probably Datadog. There's also Logtail, Papertrail, Splunk,
       Logstash and others.  These are well put together products with a
       host of great features, such as excellent UIs, sophisticated live
       searching via web interfaces and sometimes query languages and
       alerting. They require various levels of installation and they have
       costs, either through volume-based tiered systems or monthly
       payments.  For a bootstrapped business, this can be problematic,
       for instance when a surge of logs - indicating a possible important
       problem that needs to be solved - pushes volume on to another tier.
       Should the "log ransom" be paid?  Instead, I recalled from earlier
       times surely the simplest log watcher: Swatchdog [1]. It is rather
       venerable software. Its file history from its source download shows
       dates in 2015, but it was written much earlier - the 90s or
       possibly 80s by Todd Atkins [2].  We wanted to have alerts in Slack
       - the blog explains how we did it. In short: *very simply*. The
       code is available [3].  [1]:
       https://github.com/ToddAtkins/swatchdog  [2]:
       https://www.linkedin.com/in/toddatkins/  [3]:
       https://github.com/profitviews/swatchdog
        
       Author : tradrich
       Score  : 15 points
       Date   : 2023-03-06 10:10 UTC (12 hours ago)
        
 (HTM) web link (profitview.net)
 (TXT) w3m dump (profitview.net)
        
       | [deleted]
        
       | iroddis wrote:
       | I really like this, the simplicity is really refreshing.
       | 
       | Nothing to do with the article, but it would be nice if Slack (or
       | IOS/Android) offered better customization of notifications.
       | Errors and warnings are indistinguishable from regular messages
       | on mobile, which means they often get lost in the shuffle.
        
       | yabones wrote:
       | Very nice. I think a lot of admins jump straight to the most
       | complicated Elasticsearch/Datadog/NewRelic stack and don't even
       | take a second to build something simpler.
       | 
       | For "unfussy" machines, I like to just set up rsyslog to send
       | high priority syslogs right to email. [1]
        
         | mxuribe wrote:
         | I agree; I like simpler approaches first. Then - if needs grow
         | - one can grow/evolve to more complxity, but only if even
         | needed.
         | 
         | Also, I used to use emails as notifications for many, many
         | years...but lately have been using my own little matrix cli
         | app/script[1]. I'm such a fan of matrix nowadays. Also, I
         | stopped sending a full log file, and merely send only a
         | snippet...Often, its enough for me to get the gist of what is
         | happening. And, if certain thresholds exceed beyond crazy
         | levels, then the messages become more urgent from my machines.
         | :-)
         | 
         | [1] shameless plug: https://github.com/mxuribe/howler
        
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       (page generated 2023-03-06 23:00 UTC)