Some Thoughts on Logging

January 24, 2009

I’m not a huge fan of syslog. It works well enough for logging on the local host, but it has been extremely fragile for us when logging from several hosts. One thing we have been thinking about at Stanziq is trying to find a better solution.

There are tools like Spread or protocols like AMQP. The basic idea behind these tools is publish-subscribe, so it should be no surprise that XMPP fits this problem domain well. This idea came from Ken during a conversation we had about logging infrastructure; I was still looking at the list of possible solutions when he made the obvious connection.

XMPP offers:

• publish subscribe semantics
• reliable delivery
• baked in presence
• multiple server implementations and client libraries in every language
• a whole suite of tools for managing commands, configuration, and extensibility

Some people might argue that solutions like AMQP are better, and for this, I think Peter has summed it up well in his post on AMQP and XMPP.

I look forward to playing with a new XMPP based logging system, and I’m sure I’ll post more about it as it starts to materialize.