"So there you are with all of your Linux servers humming along happily. You have tested, tweaked, and configured until they are performing at their peak of perfection. Users are hardly whining at all. Life is good. You may relax and indulge in some nice, relaxing rounds of TuxKart. After all, you earned it.
"Except for one little remaining chore: monitoring your log files. [insert horrible alarming music of your choice here.] You're conscientious, so you know you can't just ignore the logs until there's a problem, especially for public services like Web and mail. Somewhere up in the pointy-haired suites, they may even be plotting to require you to track and analyze all sorts of server statistics.
"Not to worry, for there are many ways to implement data reduction, which is what log parsing is all about. You want to slice and dice your logs to present only the data you're interested in viewing. Unless you wish to devote your entire life to manually analyzing log files. Even if you only pay attention to logfiles when you're debugging a problem, having some tools to weed out the noise is helpful."
