Last updated at Mon, 06 Nov 2017 20:37:08 GMT

how-to-send-logentries-alerts-to-bigPanda

Working in customer support we are usually the first to receive feature requests, integration requests or recommendations. We would then relay this to our product team. But we often get requests that we can tackle ourselves whether this may be small coding tasks or account changes. So when we heard a user wanted to be able to forward their Logentries alerts to BigPanda.io, we made that happen.

When any issues occur, time to resolution matters. Because Logentries streams your log data in real-time, you receive alerts within seconds. If you are an IT professional managing several distributed systems, apps and services which may all have their own individual alerting system it can be easy to get lost in all of the noise, which could lead to minor and critical issues being missed or overlooked. Sending all of these alerts to a central service for correlation is a great prevention to alert overload. Queue BigPanda.

BigPanda.io centralizes and correlates all of your IT alerts. Using this alongside Logentries, allows you to centralize all alerts generated from your log data in a neat dashboard, alongside alerts from other sources.

Using a python twisted web server example, I modified it so it can handle our alert payload, modified this payload to contain the required fields and then forward this to BigPandas alert endpoint. The steps below assume you have a Logentries and a BigPanda account. Don’t yet have a Logentries account? You can sign up for a free trial, it’s really quick. You can also sign up for a free BigPanda trial.

What do I need to do?

  1. From your BigPanda.io dashboard click on Integrations, New Integration, then find the Alerts REST API and click integrate.

  2. Give it a name and click ‘Generate your App Key’. You will need the App Key and the Authorization Bearer key for the script later.

  3. Download the script from our Github Community repo located here and save it to the machine you wish to run the web server from.

  4. Edit the script to include the App key and Bearer key with the relevant keys you took note of in step 2.

  5. To start the web server run sudo twistd -y bigpanda_proxy.py. You will notice after running this  command twisted will generate a log file in the same directory. You can check this to make sure everything is ok.

  6. Next, we need to make sure our alerts are sent to our web server that is now running. In your Logentries account create or modify an existing alert in your Tags & Alerts page. Under the Add an alert section, enable the Web hook option and specify the ip and port of the machine that is running the script. The script defaults to using port 10000.

    Example url: http://0.0.0.0:10000/form

  7. Now, trigger an alert and check out your BigPanda dashboard.

  8. There you have it, all of your Logentries alerts in one neat UI. If you have any questions feel free to email support@logentries.com