LinuxCon: How Facebook Monitors Hundreds of Thousands of Servers with Netconsole

Many organizations will choose to use syslog as a way to track potential server errors, but Owens said that kernel bugs can crash a machine, so it doesn’t help nearly as much as netconsole. He added that Facebook had a system in the past for monitoring that used syslog-ng and it was less than 60 percent reliable. In contrast, Owens said that netconsole is highly scalable and can handle enormous log volume with greater than 99.99 percent reliability.