Sending alerts for PHP fatal errors

If you need to send alerts for PHP errors or some other error messages you can use SEC simple event correlator. Here’s how you can do that. It’s assumed that you use php-fpm / nginx setup on Centos 6.5, but it should work on Debian/Ubuntu as well.

Let’s suppose your PHP log is in /var/log/php-fpm/example.com-error.log. Make sure you have catch_workers_output = yes in your php-fpm configuration file so PHP errors go to a dedicated file.

We need to install sec. Basically it’s a Perl script (~11k lines of code!), but we will install it from rpm with yum.

yum install sec

Now we need to creare a configuration files for it. Put this to /etc/sec/php.conf:

type=Single
ptype=RegExp
pattern=^\[.+\] PHP Fatal error.+$
desc=PHP error
action=add nginx-php-errors $0

type=Calendar
time=* * * * *
desc=Mail web errors
context=nginx-php-errors
action=report nginx-php-errors /bin/mail -s "example.com PHP errors" admin@example.com; delete nginx-php-errors;

Now add the following line to /etc/sysconfig/sec:

SEC_ARGS[0]="-detach --conf=/etc/sec/php.conf --input=/var/log/php-fpm/example.com-error.log -log=/var/log/sec -intevents -pid=/var/run/sec.pid --debug=6"

If you need to monitor more than one log, you can add similar line:

SEC_ARGS[1]="-detach --conf=/etc/sec/php2.conf --input=/var/log/php-fpm/example2.com-error.log -log=/var/log/sec -intevents -pid=/var/run/sec2.pid --debug=6"

Start it:

service sec start

And wait. SEC will send you a notification when there’s a fatal error.
It uses a regular expression to find what it needs to send. So you can use it for more complex setups, like application logs or web server access logs.

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