Extracting Data

Note: This feature is still in BETA, you should expect bugs and incompatible changes in the future.

Log messages contain a good deal of useful data, but it’s not always easy to get at. The log parser built into lnav is able to extract data as described by Log Formats as well as discovering data in plain text messages. This data can then be queried and processed using the SQLite front-end that is also incorporated into lnav. As an example, the following Syslog message from sudo can be processed to extract several key/value pairs:

Jul 31 11:42:26 Example-MacBook-Pro.local sudo[87024]:  testuser : TTY=ttys004 ; PWD=/Users/testuser/github/lbuild ; USER=root ; COMMAND=/usr/bin/make install

The data that can be extracted by the parser is viewable directly in lnav by pressing the ‘p’ key. The results will be shown in an overlay like the following:

Current Time: 2013-07-31T11:42:26.000  Original Time: 2013-07-31T11:42:26.000  Offset: +0.000
Known message fields:
├ log_hostname = Example-MacBook-Pro.local
├ log_procname = sudo
├ log_pid      = 87024
Discovered message fields:
├ col_0        = testuser
├ TTY          = ttys004
├ PWD          = /Users/testuser/github/lbuild
├ USER         = root
└ COMMAND      = /usr/bin/make install

Notice that the parser has detected pairs of the form ‘<key>=<value>’. The data parser will also look for pairs separated by a colon. If there are no clearly demarcated pairs, then the parser will extract anything that looks like data values and assign them keys of the form ‘col_N’. For example, two data values, an IPv4 address and a symbol, will be extracted from the following log message:

Apr 29 08:13:43 sample-centos5 avahi-daemon[2467]: Registering new address record for 10.1.10.62 on eth0.

Since there are no keys for the values in the message, the parser will assign ‘col_0’ for the IP address and ‘col_1’ for the symbol, as seen here:

Current Time: 2013-04-29T08:13:43.000  Original Time: 2013-04-29T08:13:43.000  Offset: +0.000
Known message fields:
├ log_hostname = sample-centos5
├ log_procname = avahi-daemon
├ log_pid      = 2467
Discovered message fields:
├ col_0        = 10.1.10.62
└ col_1        = eth0

Now that you have an idea of how the parser works, you can begin to perform queries on the data that is being extracted. The SQLite database engine is embedded into lnav and its Virtual Table mechanism is used to provide a means to process this log data. Each log format has its own table that can be used to access all of the loaded messages that are in that format. For accessing log message content that is more free-form, like the examples given here, the logline table can be used. The logline table is recreated for each query and is based on the format and pairs discovered in the log message at the top of the display.

Queries can be performed by pressing the semi-colon (;) key in lnav. After pressing the key, the overlay showing any known or discovered fields will be displayed to give you an idea of what data is available. The query can be any SQL query supported by SQLite. To make analysis easier, lnav includes many extra functions for processing strings, paths, and IP addresses. See SQLite Interface for more information.

As an example, the simplest query to perform initially would be a “select all”, like so:

SELECT * FROM logline

When this query is run against the second example log message given above, the following results are received:

log_line log_part         log_time        log_idle_msecs log_level  log_hostname  log_procname log_pid           col_0          col_1

     292 p.0      2013-04-11T16:42:51.000              0 info      localhost      avahi-daemon     2480    fe80::a00:27ff:fe98:7f6e eth0
     293 p.0      2013-04-11T16:42:51.000              0 info      localhost      avahi-daemon     2480    10.0.2.15                eth0
     330 p.0      2013-04-11T16:47:02.000              0 info      localhost      avahi-daemon     2480    fe80::a00:27ff:fe98:7f6e eth0
     336 p.0      2013-04-11T16:47:02.000              0 info      localhost      avahi-daemon     2480    10.1.10.75               eth0
     343 p.0      2013-04-11T16:47:02.000              0 info      localhost      avahi-daemon     2480    10.1.10.75               eth0
     370 p.0      2013-04-11T16:59:39.000              0 info      localhost      avahi-daemon     2480    10.1.10.75               eth0
     377 p.0      2013-04-11T16:59:39.000              0 info      localhost      avahi-daemon     2480    10.1.10.75               eth0
     382 p.0      2013-04-11T16:59:41.000              0 info      localhost      avahi-daemon     2480    fe80::a00:27ff:fe98:7f6e eth0
     401 p.0      2013-04-11T17:20:45.000              0 info      localhost      avahi-daemon     4247    fe80::a00:27ff:fe98:7f6e eth0
     402 p.0      2013-04-11T17:20:45.000              0 info      localhost      avahi-daemon     4247    10.1.10.75               eth0

     735 p.0      2013-04-11T17:41:46.000              0 info      sample-centos5 avahi-daemon     2465    fe80::a00:27ff:fe98:7f6e eth0
     736 p.0      2013-04-11T17:41:46.000              0 info      sample-centos5 avahi-daemon     2465    10.1.10.75               eth0
     781 p.0      2013-04-12T03:32:30.000              0 info      sample-centos5 avahi-daemon     2465    10.1.10.64               eth0
     788 p.0      2013-04-12T03:32:30.000              0 info      sample-centos5 avahi-daemon     2465    10.1.10.64               eth0
    1166 p.0      2013-04-25T10:56:00.000              0 info      sample-centos5 avahi-daemon     2467    fe80::a00:27ff:fe98:7f6e eth0
    1167 p.0      2013-04-25T10:56:00.000              0 info      sample-centos5 avahi-daemon     2467    10.1.10.111              eth0
    1246 p.0      2013-04-26T06:06:25.000              0 info      sample-centos5 avahi-daemon     2467    10.1.10.49               eth0
    1253 p.0      2013-04-26T06:06:25.000              0 info      sample-centos5 avahi-daemon     2467    10.1.10.49               eth0
    1454 p.0      2013-04-28T06:53:55.000              0 info      sample-centos5 avahi-daemon     2467    10.1.10.103              eth0
    1461 p.0      2013-04-28T06:53:55.000              0 info      sample-centos5 avahi-daemon     2467    10.1.10.103              eth0

    1497 p.0      2013-04-29T08:13:43.000              0 info      sample-centos5 avahi-daemon     2467    10.1.10.62               eth0
    1504 p.0      2013-04-29T08:13:43.000              0 info      sample-centos5 avahi-daemon     2467    10.1.10.62               eth0

Note that lnav is not returning results for all messages that are in this syslog file. Rather, it searches for messages that match the format for the given line and returns only those messages in results. In this case, that format is “Registering new address record for <IP> on <symbol>”, which corresponds to the parts of the message that were not recognized as data.

More sophisticated queries can be done, of course. For example, to find out the frequency of IP addresses mentioned in these messages, you can run:

SELECT col_0,count(*) FROM logline GROUP BY col_0

The results for this query are:

          col_0          count(*)

10.0.2.15                       1
10.1.10.49                      2
10.1.10.62                      2
10.1.10.64                      2
10.1.10.75                      6
10.1.10.103                     2
10.1.10.111                     1
fe80::a00:27ff:fe98:7f6e        6

Since this type of query is fairly common, lnav includes a “summarize” command that will compute the frequencies of identifiers as well as min, max, average, median, and standard deviation for number columns. In this case, you can run the following to compute the frequencies and return an ordered set of results:

:summarize col_0

Recognized Data Types

When searching for data to extract from log messages, lnav looks for the following set of patterns:

Strings

Single and double-quoted strings. Example: “The quick brown fox.”

URLs

URLs that contain the ‘://’ separator. Example: http://example.com

Paths

File system paths. Examples: /path/to/file, ./relative/path

MAC Address

Ethernet MAC addresses. Example: c4:2c:03:0e:e4:4a

Hex Dumps

A colon-separated string of hex numbers. Example: e8:06:88:ff

Date/Time

Date and time stamps of the form “YYYY-mm-DD” and “HH:MM:SS”.

IP Addresses

IPv4 and IPv6 addresses. Examples: 127.0.0.1, fe80::c62c:3ff:fe0e:e44a%en0

UUID

The common formatting for 128-bit UUIDs. Example: 0E305E39-F1E9-4DE4-B10B-5829E5DF54D0

Version Numbers

Dot-separated version numbers. Example: 3.7.17

Numbers

Numbers in base ten, hex, and octal formats. Examples: 1234, 0xbeef, 0777

E-Mail Address

Strings that look close to an e-mail address. Example: gary@example.com

Constants

Common constants in languages, like: true, false, null, None.

Symbols

Words that follow the common conventions for symbols in programming languages. For example, containing all capital letters, or separated by colons. Example: SOME_CONSTANT_VALUE, namespace::value