Sending log entries to hosted logging services (from a linux)

Below are some instructions on forwarding log entries from a server to a centralized logging service.

There are many advantages to such an arrangement, including

• access to logs from multiple related services in a single location.
• access control where different groups can see different views.
• search apis - query log records by indexed fields, time ranges, etc.
• built-in reporting, filtering, etc on web pages and queries via API.
• in virtualized and cloud environments where servers may come and go on-demand the log entries are captured even if the server and it’s volumes have gone away.

Centralized logging services, or Logging as a Service (LaaS), accept streams of log entries over the network, index them, and make them available to you.

We are going to utilize two LaaS providers in these examples: Loggly and Logsene.

Getting a certificate to add SSL capability to a public web server

We need to serve pages on a public web server via the https protocol, in addition to http. In order to do that, we need a certificate signed by a known, generally trusted, Certificate Authority (CA).

This documents the process we went through for a particular web server