syslog-ng Open Source Edition 3.18 - Administration Guide

To make multi-line messages more readable when written to a file, use a template in the destination and instead of the ${MESSAGE} macro, use the following: $(indent-multi-line ${MESSAGE}). This expression inserts a tab after every newline character (except when a tab is already present), indenting every line of the message after the first. For example:

destination d_file {
    file ("/var/log/messages"
        template("${ISODATE} ${HOST} $(indent-multi-line ${MESSAGE})\n")
    );
};

For details on using templates, see Templates and macros.

To actually convert the lines of multi-line messages to single line (by replacing the newline characters with whitespaces), use the flags(no-multi-line) option in the source.