log2pg

Log2pg is a tool for forwarding log files to Postgresql. Monitors files for changes and new content is parsed and inserted into the database as soon as possible.

Log2pg is a command-line utility for the Linux operating system. Currently only supports the Postgresql database as backend.

Build and Install

Install the required dependencies (see Built With section). Below are the commands for install the required packages on some of the most widespread distributions (contribute sending the command if your distro is not listed):

# Fedora, CentOs, RedHat
dnf install gcc make libconfig-devel postgresql-devel pcre2-devel

Obtain a copy of code cloning the git repo or downloading the zipped code sources of the project. Then compile the sources.

git clone https://github.com/torrentg/log2pg.git log2p
cd log2pg
make

At this moment you can use the newly created executable.

./build/log2pg -f conf/log2pg.conf

Configuration File

You can find a fully detailed configuration file in conf/log2pg.conf.

We pay special attention to starts and ends parameters because they determine the identification of chunks (pieces of text containing a database row info).

• Case only ends. All file content is processed. The chunk separator is indicated by ends.
  • Example: Syslog files. These files contain one trace per line, in this case ends="\\n" suffices to identify chunks.
• Case only starts. All file content is processed. The chunk separator is indicated by starts.
  • Example: Java log files. These files can contain stacktraces. This prevents the use of ends. In contrast, all java traces starts with a regular pattern (eg. a timestamp at the begining of the line similar to 2018-06-10 12:52:39). In this case starts="^[0-9]{4}-[0-9]{2}-[0-9]{2} [0-9][2}:[0-9][2}:[0-9][2} " identifies chunks.
• Case ends and starts. Only file content starting by starts and ending with ends is processed.
  • Example: A java properties file. These files contains a list of key-value items. Multi-line values are allowed using backslash + end-of-line. Comments and blank lines are not taken into account. In this case, properties can be identified using starts="^[[:alpha:]]" and ends="[^\\\\]\\n" (end-of-line not preceded by a backslash).

Example: Apache log file

We want to insert apache access_log file into postgres database table t_http_access. Apache combined-type log traces look like this:

192.168.1.2 - - [10/Jun/2018:08:43:44 +0200] "GET /dependencies.html HTTP/1.1" 200 20174 "http://www.ccruncher.net/gstarted.html" "Mozilla/5.0 (X11; Fedora; Linux x86_64; rv:60.0) Gecko/20100101 Firefox/60.0"
192.168.1.2 - - [10/Jun/2018:08:44:01 +0200] "GET /ifileref.html HTTP/1.1" 200 57071 "http://www.ccruncher.net/dependencies.html" "Mozilla/5.0 (X11; Fedora; Linux x86_64; rv:60.0) Gecko/20100101 Firefox/60.0"
192.168.1.2 - - [10/Jun/2018:08:44:09 +0200] "GET /features.html HTTP/1.1" 200 8299 "http://www.ccruncher.net/ifileref.html" "Mozilla/5.0 (X11; Fedora; Linux x86_64; rv:60.0) Gecko/20100101 Firefox/60.0"
122.169.98.209 - - [10/Jun/2018:08:56:21 +0200] "GET / HTTP/1.0" 200 50 "-" "-"
176.62.87.189 - - [10/Jun/2018:09:15:08 +0200] "GET / HTTP/1.0" 200 50 "-" "-"

Check that your httpd.conf contains the following lines:

LogFormat "%h %l %u %t \"%r\" %>s %b \"%{Referer}i\" \"%{User-Agent}i\"" combined
CustomLog "logs/access_log" combined

A basic configuration file showing the capabilities of log2pg:

syslog = {
  facility = "local7";
  level = "info";
  tag = "log2pg";
};

database = {
  connection-url = "postgresql://log2pg:log2pg@localhost:5432/log2pg";
  retry-interval = 10000; // 10 seconds
  max-failed-reconnections = 3;
  transaction = {
    max-inserts = 10000;
    max-duration = 2000;  // 2 seconds
    idle-timeout = 500;   // 0.5 seconds
  };
};

files = (
  {
    path = "/var/log/httpd/access_log";
    format = "httpd_access";
    table = "httpd";
    discard = "access_log.l2p";
  }
);

formats = (
  {
    name = "httpd_access";
    values = "^(?<hostname>[^ \\t]+)[ \\t]+"
             "(?<identd>[^ \\t]+)[ \\t]+"
             "(?<userid>[^ \\t]+)[ \\t]+"
             "\[(?<rtime>[^\]]+)\][ \\t]+"
             "\"(?<request>[^\"]*)\"[ \\t]+"
             "(?<status>[0-9-]+)[ \\t]+"
             "(?<bytes>[0-9-]+).*$";
    ends = "\\n";
  }
);

tables = (
  {
    name = "httpd_access";
    sql = "insert into t_httpd_access(hostname, identd, userid, rtime, request, status, bytes, referer, useragent) "
          "values($hostname, $identd, $userid, to_timestamp($rtime, 'DD/Mon/YYYY:HH24:MI:SS'), $request, "
          "NULLIF($status, '-')::integer, NULLIF($bytes, '-')::integer, $referer, $useragent)";
  }
);

Technical Description

Log2pg is coded in C following a class-like coding style (struct + functions). The main components and their relationships are shown below.

Built With

Log2pg relies on the following projects:

• inotify. A Linux kernel subsystem to report filesystem changes to applications.
• syslog. The the-facto standard logging solution on Unix-like systems.
• libpq. The C application programmer's interface to PostgreSQL.
• pcre2. A library that implement regular expression pattern matching using the same syntax and semantics as Perl 5.
• libconfig. A simple library for processing structured configuration files.

Authors

• Gerard Torrent - Initial work - torrentg

License

This project is licensed under the GNU GPL v2.0 License - see the LICENSE file for details.