Is there a open source monitoring package that monitors logs for specific string patterns?

Question

In our current system, we are not effectively monitoring the logs for errors as most of the errors are not serious enough. I want to basically warn users on the important errors. I cannot touch the code, so I cannot change these messages type to fatal.

So, I want to write scripts searching logs for the regex of the important error messages. Is there a opensource software package that does this?

Answer 1

You could do this with nagios. The nrpe plugin allows you to execute custom scripts on a machine. Such a script could easily parse a log and report back the results.

There are already many plugins so you may not need to write anything

Answer 2

For general use (with system log for example), you can try out yaala or petit.