mirrorlog

A customizable, multithreaded log server that provides a lot of functionality in a very small package.

Features

Logging to console and timestamped log files
Client-set component names to make searching logs easy
Simple stateless protocol, server is easy to talk to with many programming languages
Configurable duration of each log file
Automatic cleaning of old logs, configurable history length
Configurable firewall to block unknown IP addresses
Managed output queue for smaller response delays

Configuration

MirrorLog’s configuration is stored in the file “mirrorlog.conf.json”

You can customize the following:

The size of the server thread pool
The port that the server listens on
The timeout for inactive clients
Enable/disable a firewall that rejects unknown clients
The list of IP addresses of known clients to allow
The length that log component names are padded to
The amount of time that one log file represents
The number of old log files that are kept

Usage

To start the server, just run mirrorlog.jar.

The server uses a persistent TCP socket. No special action is needed when connecting or disconnecting.

To submit a log event to the server, send it the string @Component@SeverityMessage\n where Component is the name of the component logging the message, Severity is a number from 0 to 3, and Message is the messaged to be logged. For example, the component “MyComponent” logging a message with severity 0 (INFO) would send the following:

@MyComponent@0This is an example log event.\n

This will log an event with severity 0 (Info), which looks like this:

2023-10-16 10:30:04 [ INFO ] MyComponent : This is an example log event.

To submit a log event with a different severity, change the 0 to 1, 2, or 3 for WARN, ERROR, or FATAL respectively.

Examples:

@MyComponent@0My Event\n -> 2023-10-16 10:30:05 [ INFO ] MyComponent : My Event

@MyComponent@1My Event\n -> 2023-10-16 10:30:06 [ WARN ] MyComponent : My Event

@MyComponent@2My Event\n -> 2023-10-16 10:30:07 [ ERROR ] MyComponent : My Event

@MyComponent@3My Event\n -> 2023-10-16 10:30:08 [ FATAL ] MyComponent : My Event

When you log an event to the server, it will echo your input to acknowledge that it has received it. Incoming events are queued, so you should receive a response from the server quickly, even if it is under load.

Logs will look best when component names are shorter than the length that they are specified to be padded to in the configuration file. A properly configured log with good component names will look like the following:

2023-10-16 10:30:05 [ INFO ]  Website        : Opening connection to "127.0.0.1".
2023-10-16 10:30:07 [ INFO ]  Website        : GET /login.html 200 OK
2023-10-16 10:30:08 [ INFO ]  AccessControl  : Starting session for user "856947126".
2023-10-16 10:30:10 [ WARN ]  AccessControl  : 4 blank parameters found in profile for user "856947126".
2023-10-16 10:30:10 [ ERROR ] Website        : GET /admin.html 403 FORBIDDEN

You can tinker with the server easily using telnet (all communication will be human-readable).

Licensing

MirrorLog is Free & Open Source Software, and is released under the MIT license. (See LICENSE)

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