README
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mtail - extract whitebox monitoring data from application logs for collection into a timeseries database
mtail is a tool for extracting metrics from application logs to be exported
into a timeseries database or timeseries calculator for alerting and
dashboarding.
It aims to fill a niche between applications that do not export their own internal state, and existing monitoring systems, without patching those applications or rewriting the same framework for custom extraction glue code.
The extraction is controlled by mtail programs which define patterns and actions:
# simple line counter
counter line_count
/$/ {
line_count++
}
Metrics are exported for scraping by a collector as JSON or Prometheus format over HTTP, or can be periodically sent to a collectd, StatsD, or Graphite collector socket.
Read the programming guide if you want to learn how to write mtail programs.
Mailing list: https://groups.google.com/forum/#!forum/mtail-users
Installation
There are various ways of installing mtail.
Precompiled binaries
Precompiled binaries for released versions are available in the Releases page on Github. Using the latest production release binary is the recommended way of installing mtail.
Windows, OSX and Linux binaries are available.
Building from source
To build mtail from the source code yourself you need to have a working Go
environment with version 1.9 or greater installed, also some additional tools
like goyacc. You can't go get the software and have it build straight away.
Sorry.
See the Build instructions for more details.
A Dockerfile is included in this repository for local development as an
alternative to installing Go in your environment, and takes care of all the
build dependency installation, if you don't care for that.
Deployment
mtail works best when it paired with a timeseries-based calculator and
alerting tool, like Prometheus.
So what you do is you take the metrics from the log files and you bring them down to the monitoring system?
It deals with the instrumentation so the engineers don't have to! It has the extraction skills! It is good at dealing with log files!!
Documentation
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There is no documentation for this package.
Source Files
Directories
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| Path | Synopsis |
|---|---|
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Package exporter provides the interface for getting metrics out of mtail, into your monitoring system of choice.
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Package exporter provides the interface for getting metrics out of mtail, into your monitoring system of choice. |
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Package metrics provides storage for metrics being recorded by mtail programs.
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Package metrics provides storage for metrics being recorded by mtail programs. |
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Package tailer provides a class that is responsible for tailing log files and extracting new log lines to be passed into the virtual machines.
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Package tailer provides a class that is responsible for tailing log files and extracting new log lines to be passed into the virtual machines. |
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file
Package file provides an abstraction over files and named pipes being tailed by `mtail`.
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Package file provides an abstraction over files and named pipes being tailed by `mtail`. |
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Package vm provides a compiler and virtual machine environment for executing mtail programs.
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Package vm provides a compiler and virtual machine environment for executing mtail programs. |
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Package watcher provides a way of watching for filesystem events and notifying observers when they occur.
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Package watcher provides a way of watching for filesystem events and notifying observers when they occur. |