I know this is an aged thread just over a year old, but I figured I'd throw a response out there, since this thread hadn't touched on the following tool:
^^^ Works great to monitor linux VPS' w/o having to install nodes or dameons therein. My monitoring machine here at the house is a Win8Pro x64 VM on a Win7Home x64host and I can monitor multiple Linux VPS' concurrently using this tool.
Hi, thanks for your responses. Our company has about 50 different linux servers; all the linux hosts are command-line only, no GUI. Log files are local to each machine, that is, the logs are not sent to a remote server. What is the best way to use splunk to monitor the logs on these machines?
The short answer is YES. You can install the Splunk server (aka full splunk) on any supported OS. You can then collect data from various other system, e.g. by installing forwarders on them.
For more information, please see the documentation;
http://docs.splunk.com/Documentation/Splunk/latest/Data/WhatSplunkcanmonitor
http://docs.splunk.com/Documentation/Splunk/latest/Deploy/Distributedoverview
Hope this helps as a starting point,
Kristian
Yes or no, depending ENTIRELY on your scenario and setup. Give us more details, please.
yes for log files monitoring only, if you find a way to mount your linux folders on your windows box with correct permissions (samba).
But really, if you can, install a forwarder on the linux box.
so you can also run scripted input, and have the full package.