Making things easier with Logwatch

You know how important it is to do a daily log review. But you also know how much of a drag it is, and that you’d rather take a severe beating. Fortunately, there are various utilities that can make the job easier. Of the various choices in the normal Linux distro repositories, Logwatch is my favorite.

Logwatch doesn’t have the fancy bells and whistles that the third-party log aggregators have, but it’s still quite good. Every morning, you’ll find a summary of the previous day’s logs delivered to your mail account. Depending on how your mail system is configured, you can have the summaries delivered to your user account on the local machine or to an email account that you can access from anywhere. It’s as easy as can be to set up, so let’s demonstrate with a hands-on lab.

Hands-on lab – installing Logwatch

To deliver its messages, Logwatch requires that the machine also has a running...