log parsing tool?

[mpalmer at hezmatt.org (Matthew Palmer)]

On Mon, Feb 22, 2010 at 04:15:22PM -0600, fedora fedora wrote:
> Anyone has good recommendations for an open-sourced log parsing and
> analyzing application? It will be used to work with syslog-ng and other
> general syslog and application logs.
> 
> I have been looking at swatch and logwatch, but would like to find out if
> there are other good choices, thanks

SEC does seem to be the "gold standard" in advanced log correlation beyond
that available in "grep | mail" type systems such as logwatch.  However it
is incredibly arcane, and despite reading a lot of documentation for it I've
never really been able to wrap my head around it.

A colleague has started to write a SEC-like tool with (I hope) a more
approachable mental model; take a look at http://github.com/rodjek/grok.  I
must (embarrasedly) admit I haven't looked at it yet, but he claims that he
reimplemented sshd_sentry (the fail2ban equivalent we use) in two lines of
rules, which seems like a nice (basic) demonstration.

- Matt