IPS 4.2 rsyslog logging support

[KT Walrus]

I run IPS 4.1 in Docker containers. Docker has support for handling logs generated by an app in a container. Standard Out and Standard Error are captured by Docker and you can send the logs out of the container to be managed/monitored with external monitoring tools.

IPS 4.1 writes errors to files in the HTML root filesystem as individual files. It would be nice if there were a setting to not store these error logs as individual files (or even in the database) but send them to syslog or standard error. Logs for admin actions could still be stored in the database (so the ACP could access them), but also have a setting to send them to syslog or standard output.

This way, I could easily set up alerts in my monitoring tools on admin/moderator actions that I might want to get an SMS message (like admin login to ACP).

So, I am suggesting that you spend some IPS 4.2 development effort to make logging of events with IPS 4.2 more like other Linux apps (especially for running in containers).

You could also just define the location and filename of an ips4.log (for standard output) and ips4-errors.log (for standard error) in /var/log.

[Charles]

5 hours ago, KT Walrus said:

So, I am suggesting that you spend some IPS 4.2 development effort to make logging of events with IPS 4.2 more like other Linux apps (especially for running in containers).

IPS4 is not a Linux app

That's really the core issue though. You are asking for a feature that nearly all of our clients would never use, requires special server setups to function, and removes the ability for IPS4 itself to see its own logs. We log things to the database so they do not write to the file system. If you set the NO_WRITES constant, your production IPS4 install will not write any files to the disk allow for a distributed, load-balanced environment to work as you would expect.

[KT Walrus]

On 12/13/2016 at 5:42 PM, Charles said:

IPS4 is not a Linux app

That's really the core issue though. You are asking for a feature that nearly all of our clients would never use, requires special server setups to function, and removes the ability for IPS4 itself to see its own logs. We log things to the database so they do not write to the file system. If you set the NO_WRITES constant, your production IPS4 install will not write any files to the disk allow for a distributed, load-balanced environment to work as you would expect.

I wasn't aware of NO_WRITES so good to know.

Still I do not think syslog'ing is just for Linux apps. A PHP app like IPS4 should support standard logging. What is so hard about inserting syslog calls within the IPS4 PHP to log NOTICES, WARNINGS, and ERRORS? As you say, you do log things to the database, so it should be easy to add an option to send the same logging to syslog.

I'm really wanting to monitor IPS4 for when it generates database and PHP errors and to alert on admin activity (including logins to the ACP).