monitoring msgs

Hi all.


I am really struggling to understand how to monitor msgs in xymon. I have read the man pages over anhd over and nothing I am doing seems to work.

In the client I have the following files  in ~/client/etc

client-local.cfg:
log:/var/log/messages:4096


localclient.cfg:
LOG /var/log/messages warn COLOR=red


The actual msgs report in the xymon web page says

"
System logs at Fri May 30 10:29:38 BST 2014 : No log data available
The client did not report any logfile data  "


I need a dummies guide to msgs monitoring!

If anyone could provide such a beast i would be immensely grateful.

cheers


Ian