We occasionally get alerted that our /var volume is over 80% full … which generally means /var/log has a lot of data, some of which is really useful and some of it not so useful. The application-specific log files already have the shortest retention period that is reasonable (and logs that are rotated out are compressed). Similarly, the system log files rotated through logrotate.conf and logrotate.d/* have been configured with reasonable retention.

Using du -sh /var/log/ showed the /var/log/sa folder took half a gig of space.

This is the daily output from sar (a “daily summary of process accounting” cron’d up with /etc/cron.d/sysstat). This content doesn’t get rotated out with the expected logrotation configuration. It’s got a special configuration at /etc/sysconfig/sysstat — changing the number of days (or, in my case, compressing some of the older files) is a quick way to reduce the amount of space the sar output files consume).