README.md

blackbox

forward files on to syslog

About

Applications often provide only a limited ability to log to syslog and often don't log in a consistent format. I also think that syslog is an operational concern and the application should not know about where it is logging. Blackbox is an experiment to decouple syslogging from an application without messing about with syslog configuration (which is tricky on BOSH VMs).

Blackbox will tail all files in sub-directories of a specified source_dir, and forward any new lines to a syslog server.

Usage

blackbox -config config.yml

The configuration file schema is as follows:

hostname: this-host

syslog:
  destination:
    transport: udp
    address: logs.example.com:1234

  source_dir: /path/to/log-dir

Consider the case where log-dir has the following structure:

/path/to/log-dir
|-- app1
|   |-- stdout.log
|   `-- stderr.log
`-- app2
    |-- foo.log
    `-- bar.log

Any new lines written to app1/stdout.log and app1/stderr.log get sent to syslog tagged as app1, while new lines written to app2/foo.log and app2/bar.log get sent to syslog tagged as app2.

Currently the priority and facility are hardcoded to INFO and user.

Installation

go get -u github.com/concourse/blackbox/cmd/blackbox