journal-brief

Show interesting new systemd journal entries since last run.

This can be run from cron to get a briefing of journal entries sent by email. Example:

$ cat /etc/cron.daily/journal-brief
#!/bin/sh
exec journal-brief -p err

By maintaining a bookmark of the last journal entry processed, journal-brief is able to carry on processing journal entries from where it left off last time, ensuring no duplicates and no missed journal entries.

Install

From git

python3 setup.py install

From PyPI

pip3 install journal-brief

On Fedora

dnf install journal-brief

Quick start

One useful feature of journal-brief is that it can generate its own configuration of which journal entries to ignore. Most of the messages you are likely to want to ignore will come from booting or shutting down. Here is the procedure for ignoring those messages:

1. Run journal-brief for the first time, ignoring its output:

journal-brief -b >/dev/null

This will cause the journal bookmark to be updated to the end of the journal.

2. Reboot

3. Run journal-brief in debrief mode, to generate configuration:

journal-brief -p err debrief > ~/.config/journal-brief/journal-brief.conf

4. Adjust to taste

Look through ~/.config/journal-brief/journal-brief.conf to check that the exclusions make sense and remove any that do not.

Configuration

A YAML configuration in ~/.config/journal-brief/journal-brief.conf defines which journal entries should be shown.

Inclusions

Each inclusion is defined by a list of journal fields and their possible matches. All fields defined in an inclusion must match at least one of their possible match values for an entry to be included.

For example, the configuration below matches all entries of priority 3 (err) or lower (like journalctl -p err), but also includes entries of priority 6 or lower from the specified systemd unit (like journalctl -p info -u myservice.service):

inclusions:
  - PRIORITY: [0, 1, 2, 3]
  - PRIORITY: [4, 5, 6]
    _SYSTEMD_UNIT: [myservice.service]

The priority configuration parameter sets the log level to add to all inclusions, and if the PRIORITY field match is not a list it is matched as a maximum value so the above could be written as:

priority: err
inclusions:
  - PRIORITY: info
    _SYSTEMD_UNIT: [myservice.service]

Exclusions

Each exclusion is defined by a list of journal fields and their possible matches. All fields in an exclusion must match at least one of their possible match values for an entry to be excluded.

For example:

exclusions:
  - MESSAGE:
      - exclude this
      - exclude this too
    SYSLOG_IDENTIFIER:
      - from here
  - MESSAGE_ID: [c7a787079b354eaaa9e77b371893cd27]
  - MESSAGE: ["/Normal exit (.*run)/"]

This would cause journal-brief to ignore journal entries that satisfy both conditions: SYSLOG_IDENTIFIER is from here, and MESSAGE is either exclude this or exclude this too.

It will also ignore any entries with the specified MESSAGE_ID.

In addition, any entries whose MESSAGE matches the (Python) regular expression Normal exit (.*run) will be excluded. Regular expressions are indicated with / at the beginning and end of the match string, and are used for matching (not searching) against the field in question at the beginning of the field's string value.

The available journal fields are described in the systemd.journal-fields(7) manual page.

Test exclusion rules

You can run journal-brief --dry-run -b stats to see how many times each exclusion rule has excluded messages, based on all messages from the current boot. The --dry-run parameter skips updating the bookmark, so you can edit the exclusion rules and try again, comparing output.

Automatically create exclusion rules

To create exclusion rules, rather than showing journal entries, run journal-brief --dry-run debrief.

Email

The standard behavior of journal-brief is to send the desired journal entries to the standard output, but if desired it can be configured to send them via email instead. To do this, add an email section to the configuration file. There are two ways that email can be sent: through a command which implements the normal mail interface, or directly via SMTP.

Configuration keys

• suppress_empty: if true, no email will be sent unless matching journal entries are found (defaults to true)

• from: RFC-5322 format address to be used as the sender address (required)

• to: RFC-5322 format address to be used as the recipient address, or a list of such addresses (required)

• cc: RFC-5322 format address to be used as a carbon-copy address, or a list of such addresses

• bcc: RFC-5322 format address to be used as a blind-carbon-copy address, or a list of such addresses

• subject: string to be used as the email message subject

• headers: dictionary of string keys and string values to be added as custom headers; the dictionary cannot include 'From', 'To', 'Cc', or 'Bcc'

Either command-based or SMTP-based delivery must be specified (but not both).

Email via command

Example:

email:
  from: "journal sender" <journal@example.com>
  to: "system admin" <admin@example.com>
  command: "sendmail -i -t"

This will cause journal-brief to execute the specified command in a child process and pipe the formatted email message to it. The supplied command string will be executed via the shell (typically identified in the SHELL environment variable) so it can make use of shell expansions and other features.

Email via SMTP

Example:

email:
  from: "journal sender" <journal@example.com>
  to: "system admin" <admin@example.com>
  smtp: {}

This will cause journal-brief to use the Python smtplib module to send the formatted email message.

Note the usage of YAML 'flow' style to specify an empty mapping for the 'smtp' configuration, allowing all of the defaults to be used. This is only necessary when no SMTP-specific configuration keys are specified.

Email SMTP configuration keys

• host: hostname or address of the SMTP server to use for sending email (defaults to localhost)

• port: port number to connect to on the SMTP server (defaults to 25)

• starttls: boolean value indicating whether STARTTLS should be used to secure the connection to the SMTP server (defaults to false)

• user: username to be used to authenticate to the SMTP server

• password: password to be used to authenticate to the SMTP server (only used if user is specified)