Fedora, Red Hat Working On "Project Lumberjack"

There's new Fedora-hosted work going on: Project Lumberjack. This initiative is about improving system logging on Linux.

As mentioned in this blog post by Balázs Scheidler, a few weeks ago a discussion took place at one of Red Hat's offices regarding Linux logging support. Besides Balázs, Lennart Poettering, Steve Gibbs, and other Linux developers were there to discuss everything about Linux logging.

In terms of what happened, "We discussed a couple of pain points for logging, logging is usually an afterthought during development, computer based processing, correllation of application logs is nearly impossible. We roughly agreed that the key to improve the situation is to involve the community at large, initiate a momentum and try to get application developers on board and have them create structured logs. We also agreed that this will not happen overnight and we need to take a gradual approach."

The result of this meeting was to come up with Project Lumberjack. Lumberjack is about integrating logs from exisiting applications that are already in a structured form, a mechanism to submit structured logs to local logging systems, a mechanism to store messages in a structured form, a way to query the structured messages, and a naming scheme for the event data.

Besides Fedora and Red Hat developers being involved, Project Lumberjack is also supported by the maintainers of rsyslog and Syslog-NG.

The project web-site describes Lumberjack as, "an open-source project to update and enhance the event log architecture. lumberjack aims to improve the creation and standardize the content of event logs by implementing the concepts and specifications proposed by the Common Event Expression (CEE). The goal is to not only provide developers and users with improved event logs, but also help build better utilities."