By Jacob Bowman

In UNIX, Log Monitoring is a big deal and there's usually several different individually unique ways that a log file can be set up, thereby making monitoring it for specific errors, a customized task.

Now, if you're the person at your job charged with the task of setting up effective UNIX monitoring for various departments within the company, you probably already know the frequency with which requests come in to monitor log files for specific strings/error codes, and how tiring it can be to set them up.

Not only do you have to write a script that will monitor the log file and extract the provided strings or codes from it, you also need to spend ample amount of time studying the log file itself. This is a step you can't do without. It is only after manually observing a log file and learning to predict its behavior that a good programmer can write the proper monitoring check for it.