Distro / Software for log collection

[evulfun]

Is there any distro out that would collect logs from variuos devices and servers and spit out reports? I'm thinking of having all my networking devices and windows, unix and linux servers logs forwarded to one machine, which would then compile reports and compare usages and stuff.

If there isn't a distro, what software packages (preferably free) would be able to handle something like this?

Any help to point me in the right driection would be great.

Thanks

[markwolfe Veteran]

What you are looking for is an application, not really a distro...

It would help if we knew what kinds of logs. Are you talking about retrieving files from known locations on network PCs/devices?

[evulfun]

I would like to have one spot to look at all the logs in my network. All the Windows event logs, iptables, maillog, netscreen, and a few others. All of these are already on a shared drive or can be forwarded using syslog.

The problem I've been having is finding one program, or a group of programs that could produce reports that are consistent with one another. And human readable.

[rezza Veteran]

Hmm, thats a pretty good idea for an app. I know there are individual log-reading tools for certain types of log, but I have never heard of one app which will take multiple logs from multiple machines and multiple services, and give you a single, easy to use interface to browse them. A niche in the market, maybe?

EDIT: what types of logs are you talking about exactly? Apache/IIS/Bulletproof FTP/sshd/vsftpd/squid/etc?

[evulfun]

I would like to have the following logs:

Netscreen traffic and alert logs from 10 devices, 3 Win2K servers (IIS, FTP, Event log if possible), 2 or 3 Debian/RedHat boxes and a few WindowsXP pc's that certain users have just to keep them running.

A little background on my network. I have 10 locations from Ottawa to Calgary, roughly 100 pc's/thin clients. Every locations is connected through a VPN with the Netscreen devices. I have 7 servers in this building. It would be nice to have all the logs in one place and easily readable at a glance.

[markwolfe Veteran]

Since this seems to be a general Networking question, and not really Linux-specific, I can move this thread where it will receive more traffic from others (Windows users) who may not visit the Linux forums.

Let me know if you think that your question/solution is more of a "Networking" thing, versus a "*nix" thing, and I will move this.

[evulfun]

Sure, move it. My thought putting it here was in case someone new of a distro.

[markwolfe Veteran]

* moved to Networking *