[SLL] seeking Web-based pager / log file viewer

[Francois Caen]

On Mon, May 12, 2008 at 9:34 AM, Phil Mocek <pmocek-sll at mocek.org> wrote:
>     * Splunk
>         * <http://www.splunk.com/product>
>         * Scope is more broad than my needs.  Not a problem, but
>           likely necessitates additional setup & configuration.

That's the mistaken assumption I made for about a year. Then I tried
it one day at work at 1630. I didn't get home late that day. The RPM
is pretty much self contained. You can have this thing up, running and
logging in -literally- 3 to 5 minutes.

>         * Not in Debian repositories

It's not open source, it's commercial. Doesn't mean it's bad.

>         * Abundance of images of people on Web site suggests its
>           target user is more interested in smiley stock photos
>           than in technical details

Watch the vidoes on the site. Don't let the rest of it turn you off.
The site is there to help PHBs fork out $5+K. But if you have less
than 500MB/day of logs, the free (beer) version works perfectly.

>  I suspect that Splunk will provide what I need, but their
>  marketing-crapola-heavy Web site's repeated insistence that it
>  does everything for everyone, that I *will* love it, etc., is
>  not reassuring, and has all the marks of something aimed at
>  Microsofties and managers of program managers.  Yuck.

They have several audiences. They want the compliance-loving PHBs to
fork out the big bucks. But part of it is also "we're engineers and
check out our cool new tool that you engineers will love"

I don't believe Splunk is worth $5K to most organizations. I strongly
believe that any sys/net admin who doesn't invest the 5 minutes it
takes to set it up is missing out.

-- 
Francois Caen