Does anyone know of a good software package for monitoring the logs of multiple Linux based servers that could be run in a real time environment. I have 16 Linux boxes and it would be alot easier if I could view all the logs in an interlaced format. I'm not that picky and if there isn't anything good, I'll just sit down and write something. But if I can prevent the "re-invention of the wheel", it would be best.

The usual approach would be to configure the syslog services on these systems to direct messages to the syslog on a designated "log host". You can then watch or process the logs on the log host. Network devices like routers often support the syslog protocol specifically so that they can also route messages to the network log host, so you could monitor those as well.

The only gotcha is that syslog is an unencrypted protocol, so you'll either need to use an extra facility to secure the flow (like SSH), or deploy syslog-ng as the syslog service on the systems and enable it's security.

Hi

Go and have a look at an application called "splunk", awesome and really easy to setup

Cheers