Re: Logging: stderr vs syslog?

On Fri, Aug 4, 2017 at 12:26 PM, Don Seiler <don(at)seiler(dot)us> wrote:

> I've just inherited a few PostgreSQL DBs, having come from Oracle land.
> I'm looking to shore up the logging situation. Right now we use stderr
> logging and they get rotated based on size threshold. I'd like for those
> old logs to be gzipped so we can keep more on disk rather than current
> method of just deleting old logs to free up space. This is mostly on pgsql
> 9.2 with a couple of 9.3, but I'm planning to upgrade everything to 9.6.3
> when I get my feet on solid ground.
>
> Couple of question around this:
>
> 1. I thought logrotate would be a no-brainer here, but it sounds like
> I should then change to use syslog rather than stderr. I've read some
> caveats around syslog needing to sync files and potentially slow things
> down. I'm wondering if any grizzled production postgres veterans could
> offer up their experience.
> 2. Alternatively I could just keep it going with stderr and have a
> separate script run find/gzip on log files beyond a certain mtime
> threshold. This would probably be the quickest to implement, but I'd much
> rather use logrotate facilities if there are no strong opinions against
> using syslog.
>
>
Personally, I'm a huge fan of syslog + logrotate. Since you're new to PG,
you should have a look at pgBadger (https://github.com/dalibo/pgbadger) to
parse / analyze / summarize the logs for you. You *may* need to set an
appropriate log_line_prefix, but, there's a few examples in the pgBadger
docs.

--Scott

> Thanks in advance for your time, I'm sure I'll be making a lot of us of
> these mailing lists in the not-too-distant future.
>
> Don.
>
> --
> Don Seiler
> www.seiler.us
>

--
--
Scott Mead
Sr. Architect
*OpenSCG <http://openscg.com>*
http://openscg.com