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I am deploying a raspberry pi in a remote location with a stable internet connection. The pi will run 24/7 and has a few services which output their logs to /var/logs/A.log, /var/logs/B.log etc.

I am planning to write a python script that will be run by crontab every 15 minutes. This script will read through the logs and only send what's not been sent before.

How should I do this? What would your recommendations be?

Due to the fact that the raspberry pi runs on a sd card, I don't know whether it would be that good an idea to use a database as I want to limit the number of writes to the SD card which has a higher rate of failure.

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  • You shouldn't do this. First, you should check if someone else had not done it before. Start with Syslog (from year 1980) and its derivatives, or with Logstash / Elastic Stack if you are into more modern things.
    – techraf
    Commented Dec 17, 2016 at 9:54
  • To add to what @techraf said there are several good remote logservices including loggly, papertrail etc. You can get a more complete list here alternativeto.net/software/loggly
    – Steve Robillard
    Commented Dec 17, 2016 at 9:58

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Well, this:

stat -c "%s" /var/log/syslog

Will give you just the current size of the file in bytes. And this:

tail -c $((A-B)) /var/log/syslog

With the shell will give you the last A - B bytes, presuming "A" and "B" are actual numbers (or variables representing integers).

That's not python, but that's the idea.

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