After diving into Drupal more and more I thought I need to point out some great reasons that convinced me with Drupal over other content management systems (CMS) and blogging-like tools like Wordpress …

Today:

System Logging Framework in drupal

every bigger application has all sorts of conditions to signal all the time… tired webmasters and system admins know that…

• Type 1 F(atal): System errors: Mysql error logfile, Webserver-logfile for hard errors, domain related logfile and these sorts are the errors you find on every unix box
• Type 2 E(rror): Application errors: then we have a couple of errors that your application can raise – like a false customer data record, a timeout while fetching an RSS feed and all that other crap… usually (web-)applications log this to one special log table
• Type 3 W(arning): messages that your application (if it's designed well) sends well BEFORE an errors could happen… this stuff is usually mailed around the world to sysadmins, webmasters, etc…
• Type 4 I(informational) – or debug messages: all the stuff a webmaster or deveoper needs to cope with all his functionality… to understand what happens… to watch his users at work and make sure everythings fine… just infos… another type of data being written or mailed somewhere…

Well – in Drupal installation you have change to find all these, including PHP and MYSQL errors from your plugins in one place – the watchdog…

Drupal has extensive logging capabilities built in.

A framework for plugins to log to same location (a database table) for all sorts of message – may they be of a fatal type like php errors or just informational purpose…

The user can view them all at once, of filter with different filters…

Thereby – the stress webmaster and drupal admin just needs to look in one place to find a (potential) problem with his site…

You say – what the heck – I don't need this…

here's a sample….

How Drupal's logging helps to secure your site

just today I looked at the watchdog of freshly migrated Marketingfan site and found 404 erors…

boring? yes – I'd never had looked at this in my apache logfiles…

but guess what?

The files

</p>

	<p>/community/xmlrpc.php	</p>

	<p>/blogs/xmlrpc.php</p>

	<p>/drupal/xmlrpc.php</p>

	<p>/xmlrpc/xmlrpc.php</p>

	<p>/xmlsrv/xmlrpc.php</p>

	<p>adxmlrpc.php	</p>

	<p>/adserver/adxmlrpc.php	</p>

	<p>/phpAdsNew/adxmlrpc.php </p>

	<p>/phpadsnew/adxmlrpc.php </p>

	<p>/phpads/adxmlrpc.php</p>

	<p>/Ads/adxmlrpc.php	</p>

	<p>/ads/adxmlrpc.php	</p>

	<p>

requested by the 216.10.12.18 were not found…

Interesting… this is just an attack to find a vulnerable DruPal or PHPads installation (older version were vulnerable there)

Well – pretty simple task to block this guy from future attacks to the server.

Also pretty simple task to contact the complaint department of it's hoster.

and this is just ONE case were I loved the logging feature…

I already implemented my own application specific logging feature to find some additional site-message in that logfile? believe me – it is SO easy once you understood the frameworks architecture!

My wishlist for the Drupal watchdog:

1. a message target configuration – to specify which message to mail (because they are URGENT)
2. a highwater level threshold – to make sure your "404 notfound message" doesn't fill up the database – a possible DDOS threat
3. making the filtering even better … maybe a two-level filter, a summary view, not sure … just even more gui features… :-)

I might come back here an update my wishlist :-)