Logstash undocumented

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:

1. 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.
2. Apply filters on the inputs, modify the way the input looks like eventually.
3. 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.

[OFF] The Old Bearded Barber

I have meaning to write about this seemingly common incident that happened last weekend for a long time. So finally, I see I have been able to gather wits together.

It was an idle Saturday afternoon in Mumbai, contrary to what you might say, the place where I live is a rather calm and serene area with not an iota of chaos that one would normally associate with the city. I woke up at around 12.30 enjoying more than a night's sleep to my delight as Kavita Bai had  switched off the fan. If she hadn't done that, I was up to break the Guiness Records for sleeping for sure!

Now, the story is not only about me and my laziness, which on the contrary would make an amazing story as well! (I would creep you out with that later, sometime) The story is of an old bearded barber. Now you would say, what is so special about an old bearded barber? Nothing. Just the way I looked at that entire encounter of around 25 minutes maybe.