"Seasoned system administrators know that routinely reading system logs is an important task, but reading endless lines from logs is both time-consuming and boring, especially if you are responsible for a large number of busy servers. In this article I will show you how to set up a system that gathers and archives system logs from many network hosts and emails only important or irregular system events to administrators.
"The majority of GNU/Linux distributions uses the good old syslogd system logger by default, which is based on the original 4.3BSD syslogd daemon. Syslogd is a fine system logger, but it lacks some advanced features modern alternatives offer. We will use syslog-ng instead, which provides all the functionality of the traditional syslogd along with some nice enhancements. Among others, it provides powerful filtering capabilities based on message content, and can also be used in a firewalled environment without problems..."
