I have a few Linux servers that I admin and I'm looking for a way to be able to analyze the /var/log/messages log as well as the Apache and Tomcat logs. I am aware of several products, such as Sawmill, but I'm not sure that suits my needs.

I need to be able to audit the logs and look for errant behavior and identify errors/problems with Apache/Tomcat, so I can notify my developers of things they need to fix.

Using a pager such as more at the command line is a tedious task at best and it is very difficult to humanly pick out the problems and items of interest from everything else in the logs.

Does anyone have any suggestions to be able to effectively digest logfiles from a sysadmin's point of view?

See for instance Sec, Logwatch, Swatch?

The little utilities like awk, sed, grep, cat, sort can be wonderful when piped together.