Apprendre Working with Strings and Log Files | Automating Everyday Engineering Tasks

As an automation engineer, you will often deal with log files generated by systems, devices, or applications. These logs are typically plain text files containing records of events, errors, warnings, and informational messages. Common log file formats include lines with timestamps, log levels (such as INFO, WARNING, ERROR), and descriptive messages. Parsing these logs is crucial for quickly identifying problems, tracking system health, and automating responses to recurring issues. Automating the process of extracting and summarizing information from logs can save significant time and reduce human error in monitoring complex systems.


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log_data = """
2024-06-01 09:15:32 INFO System started successfully.
2024-06-01 09:16:01 WARNING Low disk space on drive C:.
2024-06-01 09:17:10 ERROR Failed to connect to database.
2024-06-01 09:18:25 INFO User login detected.
2024-06-01 09:19:45 ERROR Unable to write to log file.
2024-06-01 09:20:10 INFO Scheduled backup completed.
"""

# Split the log data into individual lines
log_lines = log_data.strip().split('\n')

# Extract all ERROR messages
error_messages = []
for line in log_lines:
    if "ERROR" in line:
        error_messages.append(line)

# Print extracted error messages
for msg in error_messages:
    print(msg)

To process log files effectively, you need to understand how to break down each line and search for specific keywords. The first step is usually splitting the log text into separate lines using the split method. Once you have each line, you can check for the presence of keywords like "ERROR" to identify relevant entries. By iterating through the lines and collecting those that match your criteria, you can build a list of messages to investigate or summarize. This approach makes it easy to automate the extraction of critical information from large log files.


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log_levels = {"INFO": 0, "WARNING": 0, "ERROR": 0}

for line in log_lines:
    for level in log_levels:
        if level in line:
            log_levels[level] += 1

for level, count in log_levels.items():
    print(f"{level}: {count}")

1. Which string method is commonly used to split log lines in Python?

2. What is the benefit of automating log parsing?

3. Fill in the blank: To check if a line contains the word 'ERROR', use 'if "ERROR" ___ line:'

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Suggested prompts:

Can you explain how the code counts each log level?

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