I'm starting to have quite the collection of Ubuntu VMs that I must manage. I'm starting to investigate Puppet for managing the configuration of all of them, and apticron to let me know what's out of date. But the issue I feel I should deal with sooner than later is log aggregation. I'd like to stay in the free/open source realm for now, seeing that we don't have much budget for something like splunk yet.

In addition to syslog, I would like to collect application specific logs (We are running different apps on different machines, from nginx+passenger for rails, to Apache+Tomcat for java, to PHP for expression engine, and mysql/postgresql database server), so that we can analyze the relavent data.

For now, I'm just looking to get all the logs one place.