Feature Request: Remote Syslog?

I was wondering if remote syslog could be added to ST or if this request has already been submitted. I would need this for two reasons:

The first is for SMB (Small/Medium Businesses). A lot of SMB have a remote Syslog server so they can correlate events in a central platform (elastic search engine like Splunk or ELK; Elasticsearch, Logstash and Kibana). This is extremely useful…moreso than having to look at the live logging solution in the cloud, at https://graph.api.smartthings.com.

The second is that I have this solution at my home; I use a lot of regex (with lognx and syslog-ng), and I personally would like to have the logs stored in a central place for further investigating.

Is this possible? I don’t see how this would be done today…

Thanks for your help!

8 Likes

Yes, I asked about this on one of the Developer Calls. I would love to pipe the output of the log through syslog on the v2 hub to one of my linux servers so that I can replay things at a later time.

4 Likes

If ST allowed syslog logging, I’d point it at papertrailapp.com in a heartbeat. A syslog stream could be directed there with nothing to set up beyond signing up. 100mb/month of logs is free which I think would cover a lot of users’ needs, and $7/mo for a GB, so it’s reasonable for a personal user. Of course with syslog, this would be another option, along with the use cases @v1k0d3n and @davglass outlined.

I’m thinking of this more in the context of the existing cloud service (no idea what v2 will bring in this arena), but if I could have my log stream be preserved somewhere, I would have much more to analyze when debugging than I can get from 30 min at a time of live logs.

3 Likes

Agreed. This feature is very much needed to allow SmartThings to get in to the business market.

2 Likes

Smartthings logs events for 7 days already, this may help you find events to aid in debugging outside live logging. Outside of this, there is no reason you can’t write a smartapp to export events to some other system. I know there are a couple smartapps already that export events to Xivley.

Thanks for the suggestion. Does Xivley have the ability to export or send the logs to a local device on my LAN? That’s really what I’m after…to be able to use a tool like ELK (elastic search, log stash, kabana) locally.

The Xivley API allows for reading and writing, so yes that would be possible.

I’ll contact Smartthings in the morning, but that’s pretty inefficient compared to syslog. One benefit is NOT sharing all of my home data in a cloud solution. Even having everything stored in a Smartthings cloud makes me a little uneasy (net/platform security is my field, so I’m naturally paranoid anyway). That’s why the Smartthings V2 seems a little promising to me…

Your data is still in the cloud with hub v2 and support will probably point you to initialstate for reporting tools.

If you really want syslog support, writing a smartapp to export events to it is your best/ if not only shot.

1 Like

So…uhm…what’s the point of asking for feature enhancements then???

I’d rather log the data before it leaves the hub if possible; and there’s where the whole “feature request” comes into play. Adding another cloud provider means that one more company owns my data, could charge for access to my data at any point in time, and it adds another layer of security complexity; security which I have zero control over. I just have to trust that everyone’s doing it right. There’s not even a way for Smartthings to currently use ‘application-based one-time passwords’…so there’s another feature request. I don’t use Dropcam for the same reason. Never have, and never will until they let me own my own video.

I checked out InitialState (Facebook is blowing up with their ads right now, so they’re obviously new on the scene with some VC backing?), but it seems to have a lot of issues still…even with basic reliability, much less…what are the security hooks in place? Pass…

Any more work on sylog (remote logging)? I just got smart things v2 hub and would like to have some more options than a remote API.

Count me in for syslog!

Would love to send the logs off to my splunk server so I can have some fun with some dashboards and stuff.

2 Likes

I have completed a splunk event logger here