Two awesome things to build: syslog-ng and apachetop

After recently receiving a great freebie from a friend (a VPS host), I've been delving into the Gentoo Linux distribution. I'm kinda impressed thus far with emerge/portage as compared against pkgsrc, but also found these two lovely apps. syslog-ng

First up, syslog-ng. I never really had a need to change from the classic syslogd/klogd combo, but it would seem I'm getting rather arcaic and needed to get with the times.

syslog-ng is a complex beast, which is undoubtedly why I went for it -- I was also considering metalog, but syslog-ng wins hands down. Check it out from the links above, very tasty.

apachetop

This is nice. apachetop simulates top, but by parsing Apache log files and displaying links hit, hitrates and whatnot. Click here for a screenshot. I can see myself using this at work already.