check_timed_logs

Script searches a text file for the appearance of a given RegEx within a given time period.
Using additional parameters you can adjust: Time string format,
time string position, number of pattern matches required to be "successful",

REQUIRES: perl-Time-Piece perl-File-ReadBackwards ON RHEL-based systems you can run: yum install perl-Time-Piece perl-File-ReadBackwards


Return Values for NRPE:
OK - There are only 0 instances of $pattern in the last $interval minutes (0)
CRITICAL - There are $hits instances of $pattern in the last $interval minutes (2)
WARNING - There are $hits instances of $pattern in the last $interval minutes (1)
UNKNOWN - There were no files matching the passed filename (3)

check_timed_logs.pl -h

Usage: check_timed_logs.pl
-pattern
-logfile
-interval
[-timepattern ]
[-warning|w ] [-critical|c ]
[-timeposition ]

To allow for rotating logfiles, any file that matches the passed filename and was changed within the passed interval is checked. e.g. If you pass /var/log/applog, this could match /var/log/applog.0, /var/log/applog.old and so on. However, it does not handle compressed (e.g. gzip/bzip) files.

Default time pattern is: %Y-%m-%d %H:%M:%S => 2012-12-31 17:20:40
Example Time patterns (from a RHEL system):
BSD/Syslog: %b %d %H:%M:%S => Dec 31 17:20:40
Apache Logs: %d/%b/%Y:%H:%M:%S (with -timeposition 3) => 31/Dec/2012:17:20:40
Websphere Logs: %d-%b-%Y %I:%M:%S %p => 31-Dec-2012 05:20:40 PM
Nagios logs: %s => 1361260238 (seconds since 01-01-1970)
For a posix time format documentation check out: http://linux.die.net/man/3/strftime

Default warning/critical threshold of pattern matches to find is: 1 -> unless you change this, you will only get OK or CRITICAL, but never WARNING

Default time position is 0
Time Position: each line is split into an array of strings on the space character, this provides the index for the first time string.
Note: If the line starts with the time, that means we start at index 0.

The values for interval and warning/critical need to be larger than zero


CHANGELOG:
1.0 2013-02-19 - initial version
1.0.1 2013-02-27 - fixed false variable reference
1.0.2 2013-10-07 - integrated threshold-comparison fix by Christoph Tavan - thanks ;)