One of the wackier ideas I have had to solve this problem, is to use a private IRC server.

(waits for laughter to subside...)

But seriously, I think it could work quite well. Standard syslog is flawed at a large site central logging because we ran out of channels, and that got me thinking. Here are some of the things that I think would be good about using IRC for application logging:

• With IRC you have easy bot's to save the log to disk, and you can do that in more than one location to have redundancy of storage
• When you are tracing a live problem, you can just log in to the appropriate logging IRC channel (with the appropriate security) and watch the log
• Support staff could use regular IRC client features to alert them to error strings as soon as they occur within the log
• The protocol is lightweight, well supported, and requires no extra daemons/libraries to be installed on your servers.
• Multiple servers running the same application (eg. a web farm) could log to a single channel, thus automatically interleaving into a single time-sorted log (each server would use a different nick to allow easy source identification)

Syslog does, of course, have many benefits. Not least of which is the ability to chose local/remote/local+remote logging via the syslog config. There are also extensions to syslog which address some of it's weaknesses.

I'd be very interested if anyone has ever done anything like this. Of course I have left may issues unaddressed, like security etc.

Update: Specifically, I'm very interested to hear if anyone has ever implemented some form of logging server using POE

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