Re^2: Tripwire: A tool for intelligent parsing of syslog messages

[bpoag]

Hey! Thanks--I love it, personally. It feels like we have a crazy good radar for system health, now. The only drawback is that it sort of takes time for the engine to "prime" itself, for lack of a better word. Several months worth of day-to-day events have to happen in order to really pair down the noise. Separating the wheat from the chaff simply takes a lot of time. After I initially built the engine, I probably spent the next 8 weeks or so allowing it to send things it felt were important to me, and me only. I built probably 70 or 80 filters before I felt it was useful for day-to-day consumption, and wouldn't spam the rest of the team with ignorable messages too often. Much of it has to do, like I said, with the fact that you never really know what an error message looks like. In enterprise environments, particularly, the potential list of error/failure/panic message permutations is enormous. It wont work if the engine is constructed to simply cherry-pick the kinds of error messages you want to see, because the remainder will fly by undetected. The best approach is reductive; collect what looks suspicious, but then tell the engine in detail, on an ongoing basis, what you don't care about. It's better to recieve an email with an innocuous failure message than it is to have a failure message go completely undetected. Thanks for the compliment, btw. :) I wish I could share the engine code, but I can't. My employer's property, obviously.. meh.