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How do I stop one broken app from eating all my log storage?

asked by aklaha 5 days ago

An app started logging the same stack trace ten times a second over a weekend. By Monday it had taken a serious bite out of our quota.

2 answers

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dcid (Daniel) 14 points 4 days ago

Three layers and you want all three.

At the source, rate limit. rsyslog has $SystemLogRateLimitInterval, most agents can cap per file.

In the pipeline, deduplicate. Identical messages in the same minute collapse to one with a count. That is the one that saves you in exactly your situation.

At the platform, alert on volume rather than only on content. A source that triples its rate is worth knowing about whether or not the messages are interesting. Almost nobody does this and it is the cheapest of the three.

mbxsec 7 points 4 days ago

The volume alert is the one. We had the other two and still got surprised, because each individual message was perfectly normal.

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