Quick & dirty log monitoring

Sometimes we have an immediate need to watch for a term in a log file. For example, if we’re doing a major deploy, we might watch for the term error in a log file. We want to make sure the rate of errors doesn’t increase.

To do this, we’ll use Yaroslav Lazor’s Log Watcher Scout Plugin. We just had a great use case for this.

Yesterday we released a preview of Redwood, a MacRuby app we’re building. Redwood works just like Spotlight on your OSX desktop but searches the web apps we commonly use at Scout (Gmail, Google Docs, and Basecamp).

To track the number of downloads, we configured the plugin to watch for the term Redwood.zip in the Apache access log and, pow, we’re tracking Redwood downloads!

This continues to be one of my favorite Scout plugins: the biggest reason we don’t monitor important metrics is that setting up monitoring is a pain. This plugin eliminates that excuse.

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