Overview

infi.logs_collector is a library for collecting diagnostic data into archives

Why not just copy /var/log?

That's a good question. There are many reasons:

• If you're only interested in the last X-hours, collecting everything is a waste
• Collecting files is not enough, we'd like to run some commands, maybe even some code
• What happens if something gets stuck along the way? We'd hate if the whole thing stopped working because we ran sg_inq on a device that's not responding.

infi.logs_collector solves these issues.

Usage

infi.logs-collector is just a library, you will need to wrap it in a script yourself.

Here's a very short and simple example:

from infi.logs_collector import run
from infi.logs_collector.items import os_items
from datetime import datetime, timedelta
now = datetime.now()
since = timedelta(hours=1)
end_result, archive_path = run("collection", os_items(), now, since)

os_items is a default list of interesting objects to collect, according to the operating system (Windows or Linux). This includes, for example, the environment variables, the host name, the /var/log directory (for Linux) and the Event Log entries (for Windows). logs_collector allows defining the items to collect (directories, files, and commands) by passing a list of "collectables":

from infi.logs_collector.collectables import File, Directory, Command
items = [ Command("sg_map", ["-x"]),
          Directory("/proc", "scsi", recursive=True),
          File('/etc/bashrc')]
...
run("collection", items, now, since)

In order to use user-supplied strings to specify the time and delta passed to run (now and since in the examples), the following helper functions are defined for string conversions:

from infi.logs_collector.scripts import parse_datestring, parse_deltastring
timestamp = parse_datestring(timestamp_str)
delta = parse_deltastring(delta_str)

Checking out the code

Run the following:

easy_install -U infi.projector
projector devenv build

Python 3

Python 3 support is experimental at this stage.