Ambient log file monitoring.

Imagine if your servers created ambient noise instead of silent log messages. What if your application infrastructure sounded like a jungle? Page views are the chittering of crickets, logins are the cackle of monkeys, and errors are the roar of a lion. This is what text_to_noise can do.

Stuff that I had to do to get this running:

1. Install the SDL Mixer library. I used Homebrew: brew install sdl sdl_mixer

2. Install text_to_noise via Rubygems: gem install text-to-noise

First, create a sound mapping configuration as shown below. Then you can pipe a log into the text_to_noise script and it will start chirping:

tail -f /var/log/mylog | text_to_noise my.sounds.rb

Alternatively, you can run text_to_noise on an existing file:

text_to_noise my.sounds.rb -f file.log

Text-To-Noise will cease processing when it reaches the end of the file.

Text-To-Noise is configured with a Ruby file. The configuration contains a set of rules for mapping a line of input text to a sound. Each mapping is a single method of the form map( pattern ).to "sound":

map( /a regex matching log lines to trigger sounds/ ).to "a sound name to play"

For example,

map( /Processing/ ).to "finch"

will match any input line that matches /Processing/ and play the sound of a finch chirping.

A mapping may target multiple sounds for a given rule. It can get boring to hear the same sound every time a page is loaded. Specify a set of sounds for a rule by passing it a list of sound names:

map( /Processing/ ).to ["canary", "finch"]

the sounds will each be played in turn for each time the rule matches.

You can also apply more advanced rules for sound generation by supplying a block to the match rule. The block is passed the MatchData object returned from the regular expression match:

map( /Completed in (\d+)ms/ ) { |match_data|
  match_data[1].to_i > 500
}.to "vulture"

The above rule will play a vulture sound iff a line matches the expression and the block returns true. Applied to a Rails log, the above rule will play a vulture sound whenever a page takes longer than 500ms to render.

Additional patterns may be added with the when condition:

map( /Completed in (\d+)ms/ ) { |match_data|
  match_data[1].to_i > 500
}.when { |match_data|
  match_data[1].to_i < 55
}.to "vulture"

The sound will play if any of the given conditions match.

Since the configuration file is Ruby, you could conceivably do just about anything you want in the condition block.

For additional details, see the Cucumber features. Also, have a look at the sample configuration.

text-to-noise currently comes with the following sounds for use in your configurations:

australian_frogmouth
blue_amazon_macaw
canary
canary2
cardinal
chicken
crickets
crow-1
crow
finch
geese
hawk
lapwing
meadow_lark_long
meadow_lark_short
mexican_red_parrot
mockingbird
nightingale
owl
owl-short
peacock
pigeons
red_lories
rooster
vulture
whipperwhill

To make your own sounds available for play, add sound_path declarations to your mapping configuration:

 sound_path "my_sounds/jungle"
 sound_path "my_sounds/circus"

 map /Session/ => "clown"
 map /404/     => "monkeys"

Each sound_path is a directory containing wav files. Now you can specify mappings to wav files in the specified directories. As with the included sounds, the '.wav' extension is optional.

Here's a starting point if you're sampling a Rails log:

# rails.configuration.rb
sound_path "tmp/sounds" # if you've got some of your own sounds you'd like to try

map /Rendered/   => %w(cardinal crickets canary), :every => 6
map /Processing/ => "crickets", :every => 4
 
map /User Load/  => %w(nightingale crickets canary)
map /SessionsController#new/ => "owl-short"
 
map /404 Not Found/ => "hawk"
map /RoutingError/  => "hawk"
 
map( /Completed in (\d+)ms/ )  { |match_data|
  match_data[1].to_i > 500
}

Start it up with:

tail -f /var/www/myrailsapp/shared/logs/production.log | text_to_noise sample.configuration.rb

Or perhaps you're interested in SSH activity on your server:

# ssh.sounds.rb
match /sshd.*Accepted/ => %w[rooster hawk chicken crow]

Get this started with:

echo 'match /sshd.*Accepted/ => %w[rooster hawk chicken crow]' > ssh.sounds.rb
tail -f /var/log/secure.log | text_to_noise ssh.sounds.rb

At the moment, this only supports playing some free bird songs that are included in the gem. Highest priority is the ability to add your own sound sets for playback.

• Capistrano integration
• Automatically refresh configurations