Tag Archives: timestamp

Readable Nagios Log Timestamps

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If you’re like me and most humans, the Nagios logfile timestamp (a unix timestamp) isn’t terribly useful when trying to grep through the logs and correlate events:

# head -2 nagios.log
[1350360000] LOG ROTATION: DAILY
[1350360000] LOG VERSION: 2.0

Here’s a nifty Perl one-liner that you can pipe your logs through:
perl -pe ‘s/(\d+)/localtime($1)/e’
to get nicer output like:

# head -2 nagios.log
[Tue Oct 16 00:00:00 2012] LOG ROTATION: DAILY
[Tue Oct 16 00:00:00 2012] LOG VERSION: 2.0

Quick and Simple Timestamping of Debug Logs

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I’ve been having some issues that may be Puppet-related. Unfortunately, Puppet (at least the old 0.25.4 client that I’m running) doesn’t timestamp the debug logs sent to stdout. I know it’s hanging somewhere, but I need concrete numbers to look at. Here’s a wonderfully simple bash script that timestamps everything sent to it on stdin, and echoes it back to stdout:

#!/bin/bash
 
DATECMD='date +%H:%M:%S'
 
while read line; do
    echo -e "$($DATECMD) $line"
done

Call it as simply as: command | ~/bin/ts, or maybe like command 2>&1 | ~/bin/ts | tee foo.log. Dead simple, but very helpful when the developers didn’t think to timestamp debug log output.

My Birthday!

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I happened to be working with some timestamps today and noticed that we’re starting to get into territory like 1234094400. So, being the geek that I am, I wondered when we’d finally hit 1234567890. The answer is 2009-02-13T18:31:30-05:00, which happens to be 18:31:30 on my birthday. Yay!