I found a cool tool, and that doesn’t even do it justice, I found a freakin’ awesome tool for monitoring whats going on with your servers and server logs.  It’s called Splunk, and it’s been around a while (a couple years at least, maybe more), but I just recently got the chance to check it out.

Wow.  Now, remember, I don’t do ANY paid reviews on this site.  So this is not me promoting something because I got a check for it.  This is me promoting something because of the principles of what I started this site for.  I found something totally cool, useful, well worth the time and money to invest in it and I want to tell all my readers about it.  That being said, just in case someone from Splunk is reading this right now and would like to send me a check, or a free license for the good promotion, I am all for it just drop me a line! 🙂

Anyway, this software can run on Windows, Linux, UNIX, you name it.  It accepts syslog input, flat file log parsing, interfaces with WMI and more.  So far, it knows what to do with everything I throw at it.  All that log data is chopped up and stored in a database so you can easily get meaningful information back out.  Probably the best feature of this whole darn thing is the interface.  Splunk has a CLI which rocks, but the web interface is one of the best I have ever seen.  Very slick, very nice, very easy to navigate, very easy to sort and search, truly amazing.  I have used other systems similar in theory (I won’t name names), and they didn’t do a half bad job at collecting the data, but it was getting anything useful out of it later that was the tough part.  Plus their appliance was much, much more expensive.

Now, do you want to know the best part?  Wait for it …. yep, it’s free!  No, really, it’s true.  They have a freely available and usable version of the software that 100% works.  The catch is that some advanced features are not enabled, and you are limited to 500MB of log data per day.  That’s great for most small shops, and to buy the Enterprise license for more features and data logging capacity, the pricing is not near as bad as the others I have seen.  Top that off with this being a better product and it’s like win, win … win … win … or something.

Go check it out, you’ll thank me if you haven’t done so already.  It’s free and installs in seconds, it’s so easy to setup you’ll laugh when you are done.  Go … now … go!  Enjoy!