As a security professional, one of the key requirements is that you centralize logging so it can be analyzed. This allows you to maintain a single point where all logs are processed and acted upon.

Even those not in the security profession can benefit from this. Gathering all application logs benefits operations as well as development professionals.

There are a large number of products on the market, both open source and commercial, that can be used to tackle this problem.

On the commercial side, we have offerings such as Splunk or Loggly that can be used to gather your logs and provide analysis on them. These are both great products that can be Puppetized.

On the open source side, the most common solution seems to be converging around Logstash, written by Jordan Sissel and now maintained by Elasticsearch.

In this chapter, we'll cover the installation of the Logstash environment using Puppet. Some of the concepts are similar to those used by some of the commercial...