Log4J Logging with RabbitMQ
In troubleshooting some problems I was having deploying my cloud-based session manager, I quickly grew frustrated by having to tail log files in three or four windows at once. With no real ability to filter what I was looking for, my important log messages would get buried under the truckloads of other DEBUG-level messages being dumped into those log files. I simply needed a better way to aggregate and monitor my log files.
I wrote an appender for Log4J that dumps logging events into a RabbitMQ queue rather than writing them to disk or inserting them into a database.
Our company is quite frugal, so the quote we got for Splunk, a tool to aggregate log files, was throat-constricting. Something in the tens of thousands! Thanks, but no thanks.
I haven't written a web front-end for this yet, but it will be really simple to when I do. It will have a listener on the log events queue that processes incoming log events and builds nice grids so I can sort and search and do all those other Web 2.0 Ajax-y things.
It's part of the larger umbrella of private, hybrid cloud utilities I have on Github. You can download the source on the vcloud project page: http://github.com/jbrisbin/vcloud/tree/master/amqp-appender/
