Introduction
Chef is a configuration management tool (like Puppet, Ansible, SaltStack, CFEngine). It is a tool which manages the configuration of centrally managed Linux servers, compute clusters, and desktops. Examples of configuration items Chef manages includes: sudo privileges, login access privileges, logging, software repositories, cronjobs. Chef is the configuration management tool for CentOS 7 and later, Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) 7 and later, and Ubuntu 16.04 and later. Operating systems earlier than those (RHEL 5 and 6, Solaris) are centrally managed using Taylor (a locally written configuration management tool).
Chef log files and directories
The logs of the routine Chef client runs are saved in several locations: