write to output stream 3 (stdout, or stderr)

Question

Is it possible to write to a 3rd output stream? My situation is that I have an a number of scripts that execute various commands, remotely across a grid of machines. Those commands result in stdout and stderr. I would however like to feedback progress to the central controlling machine, without cluttering it with the interlaced stdout and stderr of the various machines in the grid. I was thinking that if it is possible to write to a 3rd output stream, that I could use it for specific status events from the grid, that the controlling script can report on, meanwhile stdout and stderr can remain redirected to log files for debugging should something go wrong. For what it is worth I will probably be implementing this in ruby, and the machines involved will be a mixture of windows and unix machines.

Answer 1

I don't think how you architect your logging is constrained by the language you're using, but log4r and syslog come to mind if you're set on ruby. If you need a truly multiplatform solution maybe you might consider some kind of message bus or ØMQ although this will incur an extra layer of complexity.

It sounds like common logfiles for info and errors that all your scripts write to might be the simplest solution. Seeing as you're managing lots of small processes rather than one big monolithic app, using a tool like Splunk might help to aggregate and analyse all the logged events.