When we get Elasticsearch logs from journald, we want to fetch only log
messages from the last run. There are two reasons for this. First, if
there are many logs, we might get a string that's too large for our
utility methods. Second, when we're looking for a specific message or
error, we almost certainly want to look only at messages from the last
execution.
Previously, we've been trying to do this by clearing out the physical
files under the journald process. But there seems to be some contention
over these directories: if journald writes a log file in between when
our deletion command deletes the file and when it deletes the log
directory, the deletion will fail.
Instead, we can use the cursor capablity of journald to retrieve journal
entries that occur only after a certain cursor. This avoids any effort
to interfere with the underlying file operations of journald.