Load balancing and other http() improvements

The http() destination can now send log messages to the destination URLs in a load-balance fashion. This means that syslog-ng OSE sends each message to only one URL. For example, you can use this to send the messages to a set of ingestion nodes or indexers of your SIEM solution if a single node cannot handle the load. For details, see "Batch mode and load balancing" in the Administration Guide.

The syslog-ng OSE http() destination now automatically follows URL redirects (maximum 3), and can use the certificate store of the system (you can enable it using the use-system-cert-store() option).

Note that the flush-bytes(), flush-lines(), and flush-timeout() options have been renamed to batch-bytes(), batch-lines(), and batch-timeout(), respectively.

Slack destination

You can now directly send messages and alerts into Slack channels. For details, see "slack: Sending alerts and notifications to a Slack channel" in the Administration Guide.

Enhancements

• The cisco-parser() now properly handles Cisco Catalyst formatted triplets.

• The system() source now automatically handles RFC5424-formatted log messages, thus supporting FreeBSD 12.0.

• When using TLS-encrypted communication, you can now compress the on-the-wire traffic using the allow-compress() option. Note that this option must be enabled both on the server and the client to have any effect. Enabling compression can significantly reduce the bandwidth required to transport the messages, but can slightly decrease the performance of syslog-ng OSE, reducing the number of transferred messages during a given period.

• The network() and syslog() source drivers can bind to an interface instead of an IP address using the interface() option.

• The network() and syslog() source drivers can reuse ports using the so-reuseport() option.