As systems administrators, application logs are often the key to our success, but also our biggest hassle. They provide clues to what’s going on when things go awry, and in those situations more detail is generally better. But when you don’t actually know something is wrong, and just want to get a sense for whether things are normal, more detail can create so much noise that it’s all but impossible to glean any useful information.

In those situations, you’d rather just have statistical information about what’s in your logs. In this article, I present a simple and easy solution to turn your logs into useful graphs, in real time. If you ever need to measure the volume of your logs, or perhaps graph the frequency of certain log events, then read on.
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