Wowza logging via rsyslog?

Wowza Streaming Engine
1

Has anyone had any success getting Wowza (therefor log4j) to send messages to a remote logging server? We generally run multiple worker instances in a load balanced configuration, killing off unneeded workers when load drops off, and having to move their log files to a central point before terminating gets to be quite a chore. I’m thinking it would be a lot more convenient to have all workers log to a central rsyslogd machine. Unfortunately there doesn’t seem to be a lot of information available on doing this.

Has anybody implemented this solution before? If so, how did you go about making it work?

2

The /conf/log4j.properties file has a commented out UDP appender. I don’t have any experience with it, however

Richard

3

Very cool. Thank you for this great howto write-up. I will try it out.

Richard

4

That would work, but since we bill customers based upon our log contents I really was looking for a solution that would use TCP.

The solution I finally developed was to use rsyslog. I designated one of my lightly-loaded EC2 instances to be by rsyslog server, and in it’s rsyslog.conf I included:

$ModLoad imtcp # loads the tcp module

$InputTCPServerRun 514 # defines what port to listen on

$EscapeControlCharactersOnReceive off # Prevents rsyslog from turning tab into #011

$template WowzaFormat,"%TIMESTAMP% %fromhost-ip% %syslogtag%%msg:::sp-if-no-1st-sp%%msg:::drop-last-lf%\n" # Defines log line format

$ActionFileDefaultTemplate WowzaFormat

local1.* /var/log/wowza.log # Specifies that all messages for facility “local1” get written to wowza log file

Then on my worker instances I set up the rsyslog.conf with:

$InputFileName /usr/local/WowzaMediaServer/logs/wowzamediaserver_access.log

$InputFileTag wowzaAccess:

$InputFileStateFile statefile_access

#$InputFileSeverity info

$InputFileFacility local1

$InputRunFileMonitor

local1.* @@

#$ActionFileDefaultTemplate RSYSLOG_TraditionalFileFormat

$template WowzaFormat,"%TIMESTAMP% %fromhost-ip% %syslogtag%%msg:::sp-if-no-1st-sp%%msg:::drop-last-lf%\n"

$ActionFileDefaultTemplate WowzaFormat

This setup has been working well for us for a couple of weeks now. I describe the setup process in a little more detail in my blog ( http://www.streemit.net/2012/04/20/remote-logging-for-wowza/) but the basic info included here should provide enough to get you started if you find that you need to centralize your Wowza logs too.

5

You could try NXLog instead of rsyslog, here’s a quick comparison about why:

https://nxlog.co/products/nxlog-community-edition/why