Logs are an essential part of observing any service; without them you'll have significant blind spots. But collecting and analyzing them can be a real challenge -- especially at scale. Not only do you need to solve the basic task of collecting your logs, but you must do it in a reliable, performant, and robust manner. Nothing is more frustrating than having your logs pipeline fall on it's face during an outage, or even worse, cause the outage!

Fear not! In this guide we'll build an observability pipeline that will send logs from JournalD to LogDNA.

Background

What is JournalD?

Journald is a utility for accessing log data across a variety of system services. It was introduced with Systemd to help system administrators collect, access, and route log data.

What is LogDNA?

LogDNA is a log management system that allows engineering and DevOps to aggregate all system, server, and application logs into one platform. Collect, monitor, store, tail, and search application logs in with one command-line or web interface.

Strategy

How This Guide Works

We'll be using Vector to accomplish this task. Vector is a popular open-source observability data platform. It's written in Rust, making it lightweight, ultra-fast and highly reliable. And we'll be deploying Vector as a agent.

What We'll Accomplish

We'll build an observability data platform that:

• Collects logs from JournalD.
  • Enriches data with useful JournalD context.
  • Efficiently collects data and checkpoints read positions to ensure data is not lost between restarts.
• Sends logs to LogDNA.
  • Buffers data in-memory or on-disk for performance and durability.
  • Compresses data to optimize bandwidth.
  • Automatically retries failed requests, with backoff.
  • Securely transmits data via Transport Layer Security (TLS).
  • Batches data to maximize throughput.

All in just a few minutes!

Tutorial

1. Install Vector

   curl --proto '=https' --tlsv1.2 -sSf https://sh.vector.dev | sh

2. Configure Vector

   cat <<-'VECTORCFG' > ./vector.toml
   [sources.journald]
   type = "journald"
   
   [sinks.out]
   type = "logdna"
   inputs = [ "journald" ]
   api_key = "${LOGDNA_API_KEY}"
   hostname = "${HOSTNAME}"
   VECTORCFG

3. Start Vector

   vector --config ./vector.toml

4. Observe Vector

   vector top

   explain this command

How was it? Did this tutorial work?  Yes  No

Next Steps

Vector is powerful tool and we're just scratching the surface in this guide. Here are a few pages we recommend that demonstrate the power and flexibility of Vector:

Vector Github repo 4k

Vector is free and open-source!

Vector getting started series

Get setup in just a few minutes

Vector documentation

Everything you need to know about Vector