Logging and Log Management by Anton Chuvakin, Kevin Schmidt, Chris Phillips (Elsevier/Syngress)

 April 9, 2013

Logs are one of the most powerful tools in the sysadmin hands, and probably of all kind of IT roles.

This book does deep into the logs and their management.

One of the aspects that I really liked about this book is the division of the text in chapters.

The book is “only” 420 pages long, but is well split in 22 chapter, so they are (on average) 21 pages long. This is a huge advantage, since it allows the reader to stop frequently without dividing a concept in two different reading sessions. Also, this policy, allows the reader to quickly find what is more important for her in that specific moment.

The book is full of good tips and good ideas that can help a lot anyone that has (or wants) to deal with logs. Also this book somehow gives the dignity to logs that they deserve, that has been forgot in the years of the point-and-click interfaces.

The only aspect that I found sad is that the book only touches some of the most current syslog system, such as rsyslog.

I’ve read online that this book is filled with grammar error… well, I’m not a native English speaker and therefore I’m not so good to discover errors in English. So I’m not evaluating this book on this specific point, nor in one direction nor in the other.

I would suggest this book to anyone wants to improve their “logging skills” and to anyone has to deal with logs in their life.

You can find the book at O’Reilly website.

Disclaimer: I received a free electronic copy of this book as part of the O’Reilly Blogger Program