Hey everyone ! I finally decided to monitor my applications more closely with Grafana. However I’m having issues building dashboards their logs.
Their logs are currently sent over syslog (in RFC3164 format) into telegraf. But it simply puts the whole message into the message field, so I can’t use specific fields (eg. URL for httpd, source IP for DNS requests, username for SSH, …) to build graphs.
I’ve read about grok patterns, but I have no idea how to use them.
Would someone have any pointer on how I could make sense out of these logs for later use ?
You said you’re using telegraf, I assume to collect them - where are you storing/querying them? Have you looked into using Loki/Promtail for this?
I store and query them using influxdb. I checked Loki but apparently it’s main feature is that it store the message as a single field, this not parsing the log at all. I didn’t know about Promtail. Is it better suited than influxdb for my usecase ?
I don’t think Loki itself parses logs on ingestion at all. I’m not sure if Promtail can ship logs to influx, I’ve only ever used it to ship to Loki. Promtail can be configured to add or parse or labels from the logs it sends, or you can just parse them at query time using builtin parsers like logfmt, json or regex. The hard part here will be figuring out the query to pull out the metrics you want to graph, which sounds like where you’re stuck already. So it’s hard to say which is actually better suited here.