CHAPTER 8
Log Review
Every day, millions of website owners read the newspaper, or get their news online. They watch the morning “talking heads” inform them about what happened in some part of the world. They consume the information that helps them feel informed. Sadly, 99.999 percent of the news they consume makes zero difference to them.
Many website owners rarely (if ever) look at their systems or website logs. If they would do so, they would get a lot more beneficial information that could impact their day. If they would review the log files, they could see things such as disk space usage, bandwidth consumption, attempts to break in, errors on their sites, and much more.
Log files are records of events for such software as operating systems, applications, content management systems, and blog software. Hardware systems such as servers also record logs. Logs are historical, and are critical to your site's safety. Information you should be interested in includes details about visitors to your site, your system's applications, and events that may be causing errors within the system.
There are plenty of state and federal regulations for log retention, and there are potentially industry-related laws. Another reason for log retention is, in the event of a lawsuit, you may have a requirement to produce months of data. In all cases, check with your lawyer, because this is not legal advice.
This chapter examines everything you need to know about these logs. That's not to say that you'll ...
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