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Glossary of Centreon Log Management terms

Alert event/alert status​

The record generated when an alert rule condition is met. The alert event is given a status based on the criteria you've defined. Alert events are shown on the Alerts > Alert events page. Possible alert statuses are:

  • CRITICAL
  • ERROR
  • WARNING
  • OK
  • UNKNOWN

Alert rule​

A set of conditions that indicate when a problem is occurring. When these conditions are met, an alert event is created and shown on the Alerts > Alert events page.

Custom attributes​

Custom attributes are key–value pairs that you add yourself to logs to provide extra context that isn't included by default. They let you describe business-specific, application-specific, or domain-specific details that OpenTelemetry doesn't define in its standard attribute set.

Event​

Log event​

A log event is a log entry.

Not to be confused with Alert events.

Service​

What produced the log. Examples: Apache, HTTPD, MySQL, Syslog, Postgres... This information is provided by the service_name attribute.

Severity​

Across most tools and platforms, logs are presented using log levels like INFO or ERROR — the format end users are most familiar with. In OpenTelemetry, this information is managed using two attributes: SeverityNumber (the severity's ID) and SeverityText (the severity's label). One SeverityText value corresponds to several SeverityNumbers.

In CLM, you will only ever see logs with a TRACE, DEBUG, INFO, WARNING, ERROR, or FATAL severity. This is because data is imported based on the SeverityNumber attribute. The values stored in the SeverityText attribute returned by the host are replaced by those defined by the OpenTelemetry standard (with the exception of WARN, which becomes WARNING). This prevents duplicates or inconsistent entries in the severity level list.

Here is the range of severity numbers that CLM takes into account (the descriptions are those of the OpenTelemetry documentation):

SeverityNumber rangeNameDescription
1-4TRACEA fine-grained debugging event.
5-8DEBUGA debugging event.
9-12INFOAn informational event. Indicates that an event happened.
13-16WARNINGA warning event. Not an error but is likely more important than an informational event.
17-20ERRORAn error event. Something went wrong.
21-24FATALA fatal error such as application or system crash.

Some tools may not include a severity number at all in their logs. Any log entry received without a severity number is given by CLM the severity number 0 (the severity is UNSPECIFIED).

Telemetry​

"Telemetry" is when a system sends information about what it's doing to another system so people can see and understand what's going on.