Filtering in systemd-journald?

[uppsju]

I see this config in /etc/systemd/journald.conf.d/proxmenux-loglevel.conf

ProxMenux: Allow info-level messages for proper log display
Proxmox default MaxLevelStore=warning drops most system logs
[Journal]
MaxLevelStore=info
MaxLevelSyslog=info

I agree that info has a lot of useful messages. Now, in my Proxmox VE host, I use iSCSI shares with multipathing, Currently this means I get lots of info messages in the kernel service like:

sd 33:0:0:1: alua: supports implicit TPGS

sd 33:0:0:1: alua: device naa.60014051c06c744da26cd4117daac9d9 port group 0 rel port 1

Is there a way to use the proxmenux-loglevel.conf to filter out these messages, similar to how it's done with rsyslog config files?

[MacRimi]

Hi @uppsju, sorry for the delay.

Looked into this and the situation is a bit tricky. journald.conf drop-ins don't support content-based filtering per message — they only control global thresholds and rate-limiting, so there's no clean way to drop specific lines from that config.

The ProxMenux drop-in raises MaxLevelStore from Proxmox's default warning to info because the Monitor's System Logs view depends on it. Without that raise, most useful log content (info-level entries from systemd, sshd, kernel) gets silently discarded before it can be shown, and the Logs view ends up almost empty. Fail2Ban and a couple of other integrations also rely on the same, so the drop-in has to stay in place.

The good news is that you can silence the multipath ALUA noise without touching it — fix it at source. In /etc/multipath.conf, under the defaults section, set verbosity 0 (or 1) and systemctl restart multipath-tools. Multipathd just emits fewer messages in the first place, the log-level threshold stays intact, and everything else keeps working.

If you'd rather keep multipath verbose but drop specific lines with a content filter, that would need rsyslog layered on top — journald itself can't do it.

Let me know how it goes.

[uppsju]

Thanks for looking into it, it's much appreciated!
I'll try your suggestion, thanks!

[uppsju]

I tried setting to 0, but it seems the messages still come through. Interestingly, if I set the verbosity to a higher number, like 3, I got more messages not from kernel but from multipathd, eg:
multipathd
client_state_machine: cli[12] poll=4 state=4 cmd="reconfigure all" repl "ok

So at the moment it doesn't seem possible to filter out the alua messages effectively. In any case, this isn't your problem, it's something about the messaging between multipath, iSCSI, and the hardware.
I've had to go back to Warning in journald however.

Thanks again for your help and for making ProxMenux as awesome as it is!