So, does an administrator need to wade through all of the log entries daily? That would be an extremely tedious task, and is really not necessary. A number of packages exist in Debian that will scan the logs for certain conditions and email the results to the administrator for further checking and action. The most common is logcheck, which checks the latest log cycles against a database of entries that an administrator might be interested in. It then emails the important ones to the administrator for further checking. There are also packages that perfonn various analysis tasks, such as email statistics or lITTP access statistics, using the system logs often combined with other information sources. They may be found using the Debian package management search facilities.
What package you use to check the logs, or even whether you use your own scripts based on string searches, is not important. The critical thing is to check the logs regularly. They can give you timely warning of impending hardware issues, software instabilities, programming problems, and attacks on your system.
