Facebook Scribe: Open source logging platform that is used a ton

Imagine hundreds of thousands of machines across many geographical dispersed datacenters just aching to send their precious log payload to the central repository off all knowledge. Because really, when you combine all the meta data with all the events you pretty much have a complete picture of your operations. Once in the central repository logs can be scanned, indexed, summarized, aggregated, refactored, diced, data cubed, and mined for every scrap of potentially useful information.

Just imagine the log stream from all of Facebook's Apache servers alone. Brutal. My guess is these are not real-time feeds so there are no streaming query issues, but the task is still daunting. Let's say they log 10 billion messages a day. That's over 1 million messages per second!

When no off the shelf products worked for them they built their own. Scribe can be downloaded from Sourceforge. But the real action is on their wiki.

I was fascinated by this account of launching an election counter in 12 hours on Facebook's main interface, all enabled through Scribe. It was done by one engineer and just a couple of designers.

How funny is it to think that this election counter is really just script that greps of a tail of logs from Scribe?

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Scribe rocks! Once you get through some painful compilation it's really easy to use.