How To View and Configure Linux Logs on Ubuntu, Debian, and CentOS

Introduction

Linux system administrators often need to look at log files for troubleshooting purposes. This is one of the first things a sysadmin would do.

Linux and the applications that run on it can generate all different types of messages, which are recorded in various log files. Linux uses a set of configuration files, directories, programs, commands and daemons to create, store and recycle these log messages. Knowing where the system keeps its log files and how to make use of related commands can therefore help save valuable time during troubleshooting.

In this tutorial, we will have a look at different parts of the Linux logging mechanism.

Disclaimer
The commands in this tutorial were tested in plain vanilla installations of CentOS 9, Ubuntu 22.10, and Debian 11.

Step 1 - Checking the Default Log File Location

The default location for log files in Linux is /var/log. You can view the list of log files in this directory with the following command:

ls -l /var/log

You’ll see something similar to this on your CentOS system:

Output
[root@centos-9-trim ~]# ls -l /var/logtotal 49316drwxr-xr-x. 2 root root 6 Sep 27 19:17 anacondadrwx------. 2 root root 99 Jan 3 08:23 audit-rw-rw----. 1 root utmp 1234560 Jan 3 16:16 btmp-rw-rw----. 1 root utmp 17305344 Jan 1 00:00 btmp-20230101drwxr-x---. 2 chrony chrony 6 Aug 10 2021 chrony-rw-r--r--. 1 root root 130466 Dec 8 22:12 cloud-init.log-rw-r-----. 1 root adm 10306 Dec 8 22:12 cloud-init-output.log-rw-------. 1 root root 36979 Jan 3 16:03 cron-rw-------. 1 root root 27360 Dec 10 23:15 cron-20221211-rw-------. 1 root root 94140 Dec 17 23:07 cron-20221218-rw-------. 1 root root 95126 Dec 24 23:14 cron-20221225-rw-------. 1 root root 95309 Dec 31 23:04 cron-20230101…

Step 2 - Viewing Log File Contents

Here are some common log files you will find under /var/log:

wtmp
utmp
dmesg
messages
maillog or mail.log
spooler
auth.log or secure

The wtmp and utmp files keep track of users logging in and out of the system. You cannot directly read the contents of these files using cat commands in the terminal – there are other specific commands for that and you will use some of these commands.

To see who is currently logged in to the Linux server, use the who command. This command gets its values from the /var/run/utmp file (for CentOS and Debian) or /run/utmp (for Ubuntu).

Here is an example from Ubuntu:

Output
root@ubuntu-22:~# whoroot pts/0 2023-01-03 16:23 (198.211.111.194)

In this particular case, we are the sole user of the system.

The last command tells you the login history of users:

Output
root@ubuntu-22:~# lastroot pts/0 198.211.111.194 Tue Jan 3 16:23 still logged inreboot system boot 5.19.0-23-generi Thu Dec 8 21:48 still runningwtmp begins Thu Dec 8 21:48:51 2022

You can also use the last command with a pipe (|) to add a grep search for specific users.

To find out when the system was last rebooted, you can run the following command:

last reboot

The result may look like this in Debian:

Output
root@debian-11-trim:~# last rebootreboot system boot 5.10.0-11-amd64 Thu Dec 8 21:49 still runningwtmp begins Thu Dec 8 21:49:39 2022

To see when did someone last logged in to the system, use lastlog:

lastlog

On a Debian server, you may see output like this:

Output
root@debian-11-trim:~# lastlogUsername Port From Latestroot pts/0 162.243.188.66 Tue Jan 3 16:23:03 +0000 2023daemon **Never logged in**bin **Never logged in**sys **Never logged in**sync **Never logged in**games **Never logged in**man **Never logged in**lp **Never logged in**mail **Never logged in**news **Never logged in**uucp **Never logged in**proxy **Never logged in**www-data **Never logged in**backup **Never logged in**list **Never logged in**irc **Never logged in**gnats **Never logged in**nobody **Never logged in**_apt **Never logged in**messagebus **Never logged in**uuidd **Never logged in**…

For other text-based log files, you can use cat, head or tail commands to read the contents.

In the example below, you’re trying to look at the last ten lines of the /var/log/messages file on a Debian server:

sudo tail /var/log/messages

You’ll receive an output similar to this:

Step 3 - Using the rsyslog Daemon

At the heart of the logging mechanism is the rsyslog daemon. This service is responsible for listening to log messages from different parts of a Linux system and routing the message to an appropriate log file in the /var/log directory. It can also forward log messages to another Linux server.

The rsyslog Configuration File

The rsyslog daemon gets its configuration information from the rsyslog.conf file. The file is located under the /etc directory.

The rsyslog.conf file tells the rsyslog daemon where to save its log messages. This instruction comes from a series of two-part lines within the file.

This file can be found at rsyslog.d/50-default.conf on Ubuntu.

The two part instruction is made up of a selector and an action. The two parts are separated by white space.

The selector part specifies what the source and importance of the log message is and the action part says what to do with the message.

The selector itself is again divided into two parts separated by a dot (.). The first part before the dot is called facility (the origin of the message) and the second part after the dot is called priority (the severity of the message).

Together, the facility/priority and the action pair tell rsyslog what to do when a log message matching the criteria is generated.

You can see an excerpt from a CentOS /etc/rsyslog.conf file with this command:

cat /etc/rsyslog.conf

You should see something like this as the output:

Output
# rsyslog configuration file# For more information see /usr/share/doc/rsyslog-*/rsyslog_conf.html# or latest version online at http://www.rsyslog.com/doc/rsyslog_conf.html # If you experience problems, see http://www.rsyslog.com/doc/troubleshoot.html#### GLOBAL DIRECTIVES ##### Where to place auxiliary filesglobal(workDirectory="/var/lib/rsyslog")# Use default timestamp formatmodule(load="builtin:omfile" Template="RSYSLOG_TraditionalFileFormat")# Include all config files in /etc/rsyslog.d/include(file="/etc/rsyslog.d/*.conf" mode="optional")#### MODULES ####module(load="imuxsock" # provides support for local system logging (e.g. via logger command) SysSock.Use="off") # Turn off message reception via local log socket; # local messages are retrieved through imjournal now.module(load="imjournal" # provides access to the systemd journal StateFile="imjournal.state") # File to store the position in the journal#module(load="imklog") # reads kernel messages (the same are read from journald)#module(load="immark") # provides --MARK-- message capability# Provides UDP syslog reception# for parameters see http://www.rsyslog.com/doc/imudp.html#module(load="imudp") # needs to be done just once#input(type="imudp" port="514")…

To understand what this all means, let’s consider the different types of facilities recognized by Linux. Here is a list:

auth or authpriv: Messages coming from authorization and security related events
kern: Any message coming from the Linux kernel
mail: Messages generated by the mail subsystem
cron: Cron daemon related messages
daemon: Messages coming from daemons
news: Messages coming from network news subsystem
lpr: Printing related log messages
user: Log messages coming from user programs
local0 to local7: Reserved for local use

And here is a list of priorities in ascending order:

debug: Debug information from programs
info: Simple informational message - no intervention is required
notice: Condition that may require attention
warn: Warning
err: Error
crit: Critical condition
alert: Condition that needs immediate intervention
emerg: Emergency condition

So now let’s consider the following line from the file:

Output
…# Log cron stuffcron.* /var/log/cron…

This just tells the rsyslog daemon to save all messages coming from the cron daemon in a file called /var/log/cron. The asterisk (*) after the dot means messages of all priorities will be logged. Similarly, if the facility was specified as an asterisk, it would mean all sources.

Facilities and priorities can be related in a number of ways.

In its default form, when there is only one priority specified after the dot, it means all events equal to or greater than that priority will be trapped. So the following directive causes any messages coming from the mail subsystem with a priority of warning or higher to be logged in a specific file under /var/log:

Output
mail.warn/var/log/mail.warn

This will log every message equal to or greater than the warn priority, but leave everything below it. So messages with err, crit, alert, or emerg will also be recorded in this file.

Using an equal sign (=) after the dot will cause only the specified priority to be logged. So if we wanted to trap only the info messages coming from the mail subsystem, the specification would be something like the following:

Output
mail.=info/var/log/mail.info

Again, if we wanted to trap everything from mail subsystem except info messages, the specification would be something like the following

Output
mail.!info/var/log/mail.info

Step 4 - Creating and Testing Your Own Log Messages

So now it’s time for you to create your own log files. To test this, you will do the following:

Add a log file specification in /etc/rsyslog.conf file
Restart the rsyslog daemon
Test the configuration using the logger utility

In the following example, you’ll add two new lines in your CentOS Linux system’s rsyslog.conf file. As you can see with the following command, each of them are coming from a facility called local4 and they have different priorities.

vi /etc/rsyslog.conf

Here’s the output:

Output
…# New lines added for testing log message generation local4.crit /var/log/local4crit.log local4.=info /var/log/local4info.log

Next, the service you’ll restart so the config file data is reloaded:

/etc/init.d/rsyslog restart

To generate the log message now, the logger application is called:

logger -p local4.info " This is a info message from local 4"

Looking under the /var/log directory now shows two new files:

Output
…-rw------- 1 root root 0 Jan 3 11:21 local4crit.log -rw------- 1 root root 72 Jan 3 11:22 local4info.log…

The size of the local4info.log is non-zero. So when you open it, you’ll see the message has been recorded:

cat /var/log/local4info.log

Output
Jan 3 11:22:32 TestLinux root: This is a info message from local 4

Step 5 - Rotating Log Files

As more and more information is written to log files, they get bigger and bigger. This obviously poses a potential performance problem. Also, the management of the files becomes cumbersome.

Linux uses the concept of rotating log files instead of purging or deleting them. When a log is rotated, a new log file is created and the old log file is renamed and optionally compressed. A log file can thus have multiple old versions remaining online. These files will go back over a period of time and will represent the backlog. Once a certain number of backlogs have been generated, a new log rotation will cause the oldest log file to be deleted.

The rotation is initiated through the logrotate utility.

The logrotate Configuration File

Like rsyslog, logrotate also depends on a configuration file and the name of this file is logrotate.conf. It’s located under /etc.

Here is what you see in the logrotate.conf file of your Debian server:

cat /etc/logrotate.conf

Output
# see "man logrotate" for details# global options do not affect preceding include directives# rotate log files weeklyweekly# keep 4 weeks worth of backlogsrotate 4# create new (empty) log files after rotating old onescreate# use date as a suffix of the rotated file#dateext# uncomment this if you want your log files compressed#compress# packages drop log rotation information into this directoryinclude /etc/logrotate.d# system-specific logs may also be configured here.

By default, log files are to be rotated weekly with four backlogs remaining online at any one time. When the program runs, a new, empty log file will be generated and optionally the old ones will be compressed.

The only exception is for wtmp and btmp files. wtmp keeps track of system logins and btmp keeps track of bad login attempts. Both these log files are to be rotated every month and no error is returned if any previous wtmp or btmp file can be found.

Custom log rotation configurations are kept under the /etc/logrotate.d directory. These are also included in the logrotate.conf with the include directive. The Debian installation shows you the content of this directory:

ls -l /etc/logrotate.d

Output
total 32-rw-r--r-- 1 root root 120 Jan 30 2021 alternatives-rw-r--r-- 1 root root 173 Jun 10 2021 apt-rw-r--r-- 1 root root 130 Oct 14 2019 btmp-rw-r--r-- 1 root root 160 Oct 19 2021 chrony-rw-r--r-- 1 root root 112 Jan 30 2021 dpkg-rw-r--r-- 1 root root 374 Feb 17 2021 rsyslog-rw-r--r-- 1 root root 235 Feb 19 2021 unattended-upgrades-rw-r--r-- 1 root root 145 Oct 14 2019 wtmp

The contents of the rsyslog shows how to recycle a number of log files:

cat /etc/logrotate.d/rsyslog

Output
/var/log/syslog/var/log/mail.info/var/log/mail.warn/var/log/mail.err/var/log/mail.log/var/log/daemon.log/var/log/kern.log/var/log/auth.log/var/log/user.log/var/log/lpr.log/var/log/cron.log/var/log/debug/var/log/messages{ rotate 4 weekly missingok notifempty compress delaycompress sharedscripts postrotate /usr/lib/rsyslog/rsyslog-rotate endscript}

As you can see, the messages file will be reinitialized every day with four days’ worth of logs being kept online. Other log files are rotated every week.

Also worth noting is the postrotate directive. This specifies the action that happens after the whole log rotation has completed.

Step 6 - Testing the Rotation

logrotate can be manually run to recycle one or more files. And to do that, you specify the relevant configuration file as an argument to the command.

To see how this works, here is a partial list of log files under /var/log directory in a test CentOS server:

ls -l /var/log

Output
total 49324…-rw-------. 1 root root 84103 Jan 3 17:20 messages-rw-------. 1 root root 165534 Dec 10 23:12 messages-20221211-rw-------. 1 root root 254743 Dec 18 00:00 messages-20221218-rw-------. 1 root root 217810 Dec 25 00:00 messages-20221225-rw-------. 1 root root 237726 Dec 31 23:45 messages-20230101drwx------. 2 root root 6 Mar 2 2022 privatedrwxr-xr-x. 2 root root 6 Feb 24 2022 qemu-galrwxrwxrwx. 1 root root 39 Mar 2 2022 README -> ../../usr/share/doc/systemd/README.logs-rw-------. 1 root root 2514753 Jan 3 17:25 secure-rw-------. 1 root root 2281107 Dec 10 23:59 secure-20221211-rw-------. 1 root root 9402839 Dec 17 23:59 secure-20221218-rw-------. 1 root root 8208657 Dec 25 00:00 secure-20221225-rw-------. 1 root root 7081010 Dec 31 23:59 secure-20230101drwxr-x---. 2 sssd sssd 6 Jan 17 2022 sssd-rw-------. 1 root root 0 Dec 8 22:11 tallylog-rw-rw-r--. 1 root utmp 2688 Jan 3 16:22 wtmp

The partial contents of the logrotate.conf file looks like this:

cat /etc/logrotate.conf

Output
# see "man logrotate" for details# global options do not affect preceding include directives# rotate log files weeklyweekly# keep 4 weeks worth of backlogsrotate 4# create new (empty) log files after rotating old onescreate# use date as a suffix of the rotated filedateext# uncomment this if you want your log files compressed#compress# packages drop log rotation information into this directoryinclude /etc/logrotate.d# system-specific logs may be also be configured here.

Next you run the logrotate command:

logrotate -fv /etc/logrotate.conf

Messages scroll over as new files are generated, errors are encountered etc. When the dust settles, you check for new mail, secure, or messages files:

ls -l /var/log/mail*

Output
-rw------- 1 root root 0 Dec 17 18:34 /var/log/maillog -rw-------. 1 root root 1830 Dec 16 16:35 /var/log/maillog-20131216 -rw------- 1 root root 359 Dec 17 18:25 /var/log/maillog-20131217

ls -l /var/log/messages*

Output
-rw------- 1 root root 148 Dec 17 18:34 /var/log/messages-rw-------. 1 root root 180429 Dec 16 16:35 /var/log/messages-20131216 -rw------- 1 root root 30554 Dec 17 18:25 /var/log/messages-20131217

ls -l /var/log/secure*

-rw------- 1 root root 0 Jan 3 12:34 /var/log/secure-rw-------. 1 root root 4187 Jan 3 16:41 /var/log/secure-20230103 -rw------- 1 root root 591 Jan 3 18:28 /var/log/secure-20230103 ```

As we can see, all three new log files have been created. The maillog and secure files are still empty, but the new messages file already has some data in it.

Conclusion

Hopefully this tutorial has given you some ideas about Linux logging. You can try to look into your own development or test systems to have a better idea. Once you are familiar with the location of the log files and their configuration settings, use that knowledge for supporting your production systems. Then you can create some aliases to point to these files to save some typing time as well.

How To View and Configure Linux Logs on Ubuntu, Debian, and CentOS | DigitalOcean (2024)