So I was playing around with logstash for a few days and it frustrated me that their documentation was awful. These guys really need to get someone to write more of the usability of the utility. For those who are not aware of this awesome tool, logstash, please do check out it's homepage. It is used for analysis of log files (in servers in most cases). So what is does is essentially 3 steps:
- Collects logs by monitoring files or sockets, executing commands, etc. It has a host of input plugins, check out the docs page for a very sparse view.
- Apply filters on the inputs, modify the way the input looks like eventually.
- Output filters, dump the data to a socket, webapp, queues, etc.
Logstash is generally used in cases of elastic search (e.g. kibana) that shows up neat graphs and searching can done in this data as well.
So in my particular case what I was trying to do was send data across to graphite, which just shows the data in a neat graph.