NAME¶
petit - log analysis tool for systems administrators
SYNOPSIS¶
petit [
OPTION] [
FILE]
DESCRIPTION¶
petit was developed to quickly analyze syslog and Apache log files in
large environments. It can also be used for word discovery within log data. It
is a general purpose tool that can do hashing, word counts, and command line
graphing of Apache and syslog files. It is designed to be a standard Unix tool
that can be employed with pipes or by opening files. Petit works by sifting
data with standard patterns and allows for custom filters and fingerprints.
This leaves the analyst with data that is both varied and interesting.
FILE can be Syslog, Apache Access, Apache Error, Snort or Raw log files.
Petit can also be used to analyze any type of file as a Raw log file, but
since time/date is not understood, they cannot be graphed.
OPTIONS¶
- -h, --help
- Displays simple usage message
- -v, --verbose
- Adds verbose output to any function
- --sample
- Sample any line for which there are 3 or less entries found
- --allsample
- Show samples for all lines found
- --filter
- Force filter files to be used during processing because some functions do
not filter by default.
- --nofilter
- Force filter files to be skipped during processing. This will work for any
function.
- --wide
- Make graphing wider for bigger screens
- --tick="%"
- Change tick character from default of "#". This can be any
single character.
- --finterprint
- Use fingerprinting to remove certain patterns from analysis. By default
this is off for most or all functions. This is a safety feature to prevent
an analyst from removing data without using an explicit switch.
- -V, --version
- Display the version of petit and exit
- --hash
- This is one of the most basic functions of petit. This function tallies
lines found. Each output line displays the number of similar lines found
in the log and what the group generally looked like. If filtering is used
in conjunction with hashing then numbers and patterns which are commonly
found and not profoundly necessary are removed from the input stream. This
leaves the analyst with approximate log entries as opposed to actual log
entries. This is useful for analyzing large log sets commonly found in
clusters/pools of servers.
- --wordcount
- Word counting is essentially like hashing except that data is grouped by
word instead of line. A custom stopwords list is used to filter out common
words found in the english language. A common use case for this function
would be word discovery. When used in connection with grep or swatch, word
counting can be used to enumarate all of the words found in a log file
which have similar meanings, such as "error, can't, fail,
reject", etc.
This is extremely useful for giving confidence when building white lists and
black lists. These lists can then be used for daily reporting or graphing
for anamoly detection.
- --daemon
- Gives a simple report of lines produced, keyed by the daemon that produced
them
- --host
- Gives a simple report of lines produced, keyed by the host that produced
them. This can be useful for analyzing machines in a cluster dedicated to
the same task. If one machine is producing too much or too little log
output there is generally a problem.
GRAPHS¶
Graphs are displayed with the following information to help analyze the log file
- --sgraph
- Show a graph of first 60 seconds of the log file
- --mgraph
- Show a graph of first 60 minutes of the log file
- --hgraph
- Show a graph of first 24 hours of the log file
- --dgraph
- Show a graph of first 31 days of the log file
- --mograph
- Show a graph of first 12 months of the log file
- --ygraph
- Show a graph of first 10 years. 10 years was chosen arbitrarily and could
be changed in the code if more time is needed.
FILES¶
- /var/lib/petit/fingerprint_library
- Fingerprint library which can be used to construct custom fingerprint
files. They are in the same format as petit's output so it is easy to
construct new fingerprints.
- /var/lib/petit/fingerprints
- Aggregate fingerprint files which can be used to filter out reboots and
other events which the administrator does not care to see
- /var/lib/petit/filters/
- Each function has a separate list of words and patterns which are removed.
Each list is stored in a designated file and specified with standard
regular expression format.
AUTHOR¶
Written by Scott McCarty, see the AUTHORS file
COPYRIGHT¶
This program is licensed under the GNU General Public License, see the file
COPYING included in the distribution archive.