View source for Monitoring logfiles on Windows with Check MK

== Introduction ==
While Check_MK does an excellent job of monitoring the Windows logs in the Windows log facility, it gets a bit trickier to monitor plain text files of applications that do not log to the Windows log.

== Solution ==
In the 1.6 release of Check_MK a plugin to do this task was provided. However in 2.0 and higher this executable was removed. So here we're going to use the executable from Check_MK 1.6p25. After that the configuration is quite straight forward.

First, download the the mk_logwatch plugin from here: [[Media:Mk_logwatch.zip|mk_logwatch.zip]]. Unzip it and place mk_logwatch.exe in the plugins directory of the Windows server (typically <tt>C:\ProgramData\checkmk\agent\plugins</tt>)

Now that the plugin is in place we need to create a configuration file for it. Create the file <tt>logwatch.cfg</tt> in <tt>C:\ProgramData\checkmk\agent\config</tt>. Just as on Linux you tell the system what logfiles to monitor and what regular expressions should trigger the monitoring system. Below is an exmaple:
 D:\MyApplication\log\MyApp.log
  I OK
  W Warning
  C Error

This tells Check_MK to monitor <tt>D:\MyApplication\log\MyApp.log</tt> and generate ''I''nformational, ''W''arning or ''C''ritical messages based on the regular expression that follows.

[[Category:Monitoring]]