After building RAG systems for Bugzilla and Redmine data, the next obvious candidate was sitting right there on every Linux machine: the system journal. Instead of grepping through journalctl output or staring at walls of log text, why not just ask plain English questions like “What went wrong last night?” and get a useful answer?
The constraints were the same as always: fully local, no cloud services, no API costs, runs on my openSUSE machines.
[Read More]The goal was to extract all issues from a Redmine instance, anonymize the data, and build a local RAG system for semantic search and Q&A.
Just like with the previous experiment with Bugzilla it started with data extraction. I planned to make a simple bulk download via Redmine API. Then came the first problem. Redmine’s API doesn’t return journal entries (comments) when using the project-level endpoint, even with the include=journals parameter. I tried out different ways but nothing worked. The solution was, after all, to change the strategy and fetch each issue individually via /issues/{id}.json. This was much slower but guaranteed complete data including all comments.
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