I am currently exploring different options for a centralized log server. We use both Linux (Ubuntu 10.04 / 12.04, LTS for both) and Windows, though for this specific issue only Linux is relevant.
I like the interface that Octopussy has and it's feature list, but I am hesitant due to a few things. One of the biggest concerns I have is that it seems to be syslog only.
The end goal is to have a centralized place for our devs and admins to be able to search through the logs generated by Apache, Tomcat and 70+ web apps spread out among a cluster, for both our prod and test environments.
While I did see that Octopussy has support for plugins, I haven't been able to find any sort of plugin repo or in depth guides as to what can be done with them.
Does anyone know if plugins can be used to allow Octopussy to non-syslog messages? Specifically log4j type log messages that may include multi-line stack traces and such.
Also, is there a user community for this software, such as a mailing list or forum? I've been unable to locate any so far.
I'm the creator of Octopussy.
First, if you want to ask question(s) about Octopussy, especially technical ones, try to ask it on SourceForge dedicated page before. I'm not sure that Octopussy has a community large enough to find answers on Stackoverflow.
So, to answer your questions...
No, Octopussy plugins are not made to use messages other than syslog style. Octopussy plugins are here to change input/output of Octopussy Reports. (change useragent to browser/os, change ip addresses to ip network...)
But there is actually one way to allow non-syslog messages in Octopussy. It's the 'asynchronous' logtype devices. With this kind of device, you can push logs through ftp/ssh to specified directory, set one or more rule(s) to transform your non-syslog to syslog logs... then Octopussy handles this device like syslog ones...