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Comment by mattkrea | Hacker News Reader

LogEntries.com

We tried logentries, but their agent was a terrible java-application, that was hard to get working right.

The list of files was saved on their service (rather than in a text-file on the server), and the name of our servers was also guessed by their servers which made it hard for us to add and maintain servers.

I think they should build a better agent that embraces UNIX more, and can be configured through a local configuration. Their platform seems nice, but we weren't able to use it, sadly.

There are two agents, the one for Linux/BSD/OSX is Python-based open source [1] (I'm one of the authors) with repositories for Debian/Ubuntu/CentOS/etc. It takes the name of the server from hostname or it can be specified via command line during initialization. Logentries supports syslog for agent-less setups if you don't mind that many syslogs have broken SSL/TLS implementation.

If you have suggestions how to improve it let me know, happy to look at it. Cilent-side configuration an metrics will be available in a week or so.

[1] https://github.com/logentries/le/

I'm sorry your experience left something to be desired. Given that we deploy across far too many hosts to actually monitor, or, frankly, care about monitoring, I use it only at the application level (logentries.log([string, object, etc[)).

Hey - You might want to check the agent docs here which have a local configuration file: https://github.com/logentries/le#configuration

So the logs being followed are actually configured in a text file on the servers. This makes it super simple for deploying via chef/puppet in large scale environments.

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