LogRotate

A sysops toolkit for scanning, monitoring, reporting, alerting, and managing system operations. Each command logs timestamped entries to local files with full export, search, and statistics support.

Commands

Core SysOps Operations

Utility Commands

How It Works

Every core command accepts free-text input. When called with arguments, LogRotate:

1. Timestamps the entry (YYYY-MM-DD HH:MM)
2. Appends it to the command-specific log file (e.g. scan.log, alert.log)
3. Records the action in a central history.log
4. Reports the saved entry and running total

When called with no arguments, each command displays the 20 most recent entries from its log file.

Data Storage

All data is stored locally in plain-text log files:

~/.local/share/logrotate/
├── scan.log          # Scan results
├── monitor.log       # Monitoring observations
├── report.log        # Report entries
├── alert.log         # Alert events
├── top.log           # Top resource consumers
├── usage.log         # Resource usage data
├── check.log         # Health check results
├── fix.log           # Fix/remediation actions
├── cleanup.log       # Cleanup operations
├── backup.log        # Backup tasks
├── restore.log       # Restore operations
├── log.log           # Generic operational entries
├── benchmark.log     # Performance benchmarks
├── compare.log       # Configuration comparisons
├── history.log       # Central activity log
└── export.{json,csv,txt}  # Exported snapshots

Each log uses pipe-delimited format: timestamp|value.

Requirements

• Bash 4.0+ with set -euo pipefail
• Standard Unix utilities: wc, du, grep, tail, date, sed
• No external dependencies — pure bash

When to Use

1. Daily system health monitoring — run scan, check, and monitor to record server state, then review with recent and stats
2. Tracking backup and restore operations — log every backup and restore with timestamps for disaster recovery audits
3. Disk cleanup and maintenance — use cleanup and usage to record what was cleaned, how much space was freed, and current disk consumption
4. Incident response documentation — log alert events when thresholds are breached, then record fix actions taken to resolve them
5. Performance benchmarking over time — use benchmark and compare to track system performance across deployments, upgrades, or configuration changes

Examples

# Record a system scan
logrotate scan "full disk scan: /var/log 2.3GB, /tmp 450MB, 12 files older than 90 days"

# Log a monitoring metric
logrotate monitor "CPU avg 78% over last 6h, memory 62%, swap 0%"

# Record an alert
logrotate alert "disk usage on /var exceeded 90% threshold at 14:32"

# Log a cleanup action
logrotate cleanup "removed 847 files from /tmp older than 30 days, freed 1.2GB"

# Record a backup
logrotate backup "daily backup completed: /data → s3://backups/2024-03-18.tar.gz (4.7GB)"

# Log a fix after an incident
logrotate fix "rotated nginx access.log manually, restarted logrotate cron, verified rotation"

# Search for disk-related entries
logrotate search "disk"

# Export all records to CSV
logrotate export csv

# View overall health
logrotate status

Configuration

Set the DATA_DIR variable in the script or modify the default path to change storage location. Default: ~/.local/share/logrotate/

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