I am looking for a better way to log cronjobs. Most cronjobs tend to spam email or the console, get ignored, or create yet another logfile.
In this case, I have a Nagios NSCA script which sends data to a central Nagios sever. This send_nsca script also prints a single status line to STDOUT, indicating success or failure.
0 * * * * root /usr/local/nagios/sbin/nsca_check_disk
This emails the following message to root@localhost, which is then forwarded to my team of sysadmins. Spam.
forwarded nsca_check_disk: 1 data packet(s) sent to host successfully.
I'm looking for a logging method which:
- Doesn't spam the messages to email or the console
- Don't create yet another krufty logfile which requires cleanup months or years later.
- Capture the log information somewhere, so it can be viewed later if desired.
- Works on most unixes
- Fits into an existing log infrastructure.
- Uses common syslog conventions like 'facility' and 'priority'
- Can work with third party scripts which don't always do logging internally.
Best Answer
In the process of writing this question, I answered myself. So I'll answer myself "Jeopardy-style". This expands on the answer provided by Dennis Williamson.
The following will send any Cron output to
/usr/bin/logger(including stderr, which is converted to stdout using2>&1), which will send to syslog, with a 'tag' ofnsca_check_disk. Syslog handles it from there. Since these systems (CentOS and FreeBSD) already have built-in log rotation mechanisms, I don't need to worry about a log like /var/log/mycustom.logfilling up a disk./var/log/messages now has one additional message which says this:
I like /usr/bin/logger , because it works well with an existing syslog configuration and infrastructure, and is included with most Unix distros. Most *nix distributions already do log rotation and do it well.