Re: [gentoo-user] I don't seem to have a system log. Help, please!

[Alec Ten Harmsel]

On 02/09/2015 08:02 AM, Rich Freeman wrote:
> Keep in mind that if you're grepping logs, there is probably a better
> way to accomplish what you want to do with journalctl's options.
> Finding all output from a particular daemon is going to be more
> reliable if you filter by unit, versus getting verbose log output from
> your mail server that has "mysql" somewhere in it or whatever.  That
> is the main reason for using a binary log format.

Of course, of course. I should have expanded a little more, but I was on
my way to work out. I don't use systemd at work, but for my server I
generally find the most helpful command to check a particular service is
`systemctl status <service>` to see how it got screwed up. I imagine it
would be pretty useful to grab the JSON output from every host and put
it in elastic search or mongodb or something, but I don't have any
experience doing that. At the same time, though, the message would still
have to be parsed by something and a lot of the metadata looks to be not
extremely useful (atm anyways).

> If you're using an automated tool you can also use cursors to bookmark
> the last entry you read and then ask journalctl for entries since that
> one.  Of course, an automated tool would probably just read the logs
> via dbus or whatever (I haven't taken the time to look into the APIs).
>

Using the low-level DBus C API makes me cry just a little bit; I've been
doing a ton of DBus stuff to add good systemd support to bossman. That
said, the API systemctl exposes over DBus is pretty common-sensical, so
I'm sure the journalctl one is straightforward as well.

Alec