The logger.conf file specifies the type
and verbosity of messages logged to the various logfiles in the
/var/log/asterisk/ directory. It has two sections,
[general] and [logfile].
Settings under the [general]
section are used to customize the output of the logs (and can safely be
left blank, as the defaults serve most people very well). However, if
you love to customize such things, read on.
You can define exactly how you want your timestamps to look
through the use of the dateformat
parameter:
dateformat=%F %T
The Linux manpage for strftime(3) lists all of the ways you can do
this.
If you want to append your system’s hostname to the names of the
logfiles, set appendhostname=yes.
This can be useful if you have a lot of systems delivering logfiles to
you.
If for some reason you do not want to log events from your queues,
you can set queue_log=no.
If generic events do not interest you, instruct Asterisk to omit
them from the logfiles by setting event_log=no.
The [logfiles] section defines
the types of information you wish to log. There are multiple ranks for
the various bits of information that will be logged, and it can be
desirable to separate log entries into different files. The general
format for lines in the [logfiles]
section is filename => levels, where
filename is the name of the file to save the
logged information to and levels are the
types of information you wish to save.
Using console for the
filename is a special exception that allows
you to control the type of information sent to the Asterisk
console.
A sample [logfiles] section
might look like this:
[logfiles] console => notice,warning,error messages => notice,warning,error
You can specify logging of the following types of information:
debug
Enabling debugging gives far more detailed output about what is happening in the system. For example, with debugging enabled, you can see what DTMF tones the users entered while accessing their voicemail boxes. Debugging information should be logged only when you are actually debugging something, as it will create massive logfiles very rapidly.
verbose
When you connect to the Asterisk console and set a verbosity
of 3 or higher, you’ll see
output on the console showing what Asterisk is doing. You can save
this output to a logfile by adding a line such as verbose_log => verbose to your
logger.conf file. Note that a high amount of
verbosity can quickly eat up hard drive space.
notice
A notice is used to inform you of minor changes to the system, such as when a peer changes state. It is normal to see these types of messages, and the events they indicate generally have no adverse effects on the server.
warning
A warning happens when Asterisk attempts to do something and is unsuccessful. These types of errors are usually not fatal, but they should be investigated, especially if a lot of them are seen.
error
Errors are often related to Out of Memory errors. They generally indicate serious problems that may lead to Asterisk to crash or freeze.