You can ssh host1 tail -F log | sed -e s/^/host1:/ But you might eventually want to log everything to a third host. Use syslog to send logs across the network

You can ssh host1 tail -F log | sed -e s/^/host1:/ But you might eventually want to log everything to a third host. Use syslog to send logs across the network and configure your local software to log to syslog. When you have 10k hosts then sampling 1 in N log lines is still useful as a canary, while avoiding being a firehouse for the central log sampler. If something heinous occurs you can get the unsampled log from the original machine, if you need it. Much more sophisticated techniques abound, and others will comment I’m sure, but it’s also nice to have the syslog trail as a fallback. You never know in advance what’s going to fail and syslog will show you everything from your Apache logs to kernel bugs and faulty NICs.