Log file management

[Matt Midgley]

How do people manage their log files? Personally, I think I should look into this myself but I'm sure you all have some good recommendations. I ask because one user had manages to accumulate 200MB in log files. I think that's crazy!

Coulple of questions:
-Do they automatically delete themselves over time?
-If not, is there an easy and effective way?
-Is there an easy way to be alerted of oversized log files?

Thanks,
Matt

 

[Matthew]

Hello Matt,
What we do is manually delete them every 4 days or so. To do this we just do a search in the domains folder for ex*.log and then once the search has completed you order them by date and highlight all the ones older then 3 - 4 days and hit delete.

For SMTP logs, FTP logs and other logs we tend to just zip them up once in a while.

We have a crazy amount of logs and decided not to include them in the users disk space quota... so anything a user see's in the logs file is not counted. We have some users have 100's MB's per day for some websites.

 

[Matt Midgley]

Wow! That's a huge ammount of log files. I never thought of the solution you just mentioned. How did you manage to exclude log file size from the diskspace quota? One more thing, would things like Awstats reports be affected if log files were deleted or does it store what it extracts from them in it's own file?

Thanks,
Matt

 

[Matthew]

The control panel we use (HELM) has an option in the admin section to switch off reporting on log files which is handy.

AWStats creates it's own log files out of the IIS log files when it parses them in. These usually get stored at awstats\data\ and there is a file each month for each domain on the system that uses it. If these files get deleted and you have deleted the IIS log files then you are stuck and cannot reimport them... so keep that directory backed up well