The syslog-ng application is a flexible and highly scalable system logging application that is ideal for creating centralized and trusted logging solutions. Among others, syslog-ng OSE allows you the following.
The syslog-ng OSE application enables you to send the log messages of your hosts to remote servers using the latest protocol standards. You can collect and store your log data centrally on dedicated log servers. Transfer log messages using the
To minimize the risk of losing important log messages, the syslog-ng OSE application can store messages on the local hard disk if the central log server or the network connection becomes unavailable. The syslog-ng application automatically sends the stored messages to the server when the connection is reestablished, in the same order the messages were received. The disk buffer is persistent – no messages are lost even if syslog-ng is restarted.
Log messages may contain sensitive information that should not be accessed by third parties. Therefore, syslog-ng OSE supports the Transport Layer Security (TLS) protocol to encrypt the communication. TLS also allows you to authenticate your clients and the logserver using X.509 certificates.
Most log messages are inherently unstructured, which makes them difficult to process. To overcome this problem, syslog-ng OSE comes with a set of built-in parsers, which you can combine to build very complex things.
The syslog-ng OSE application can sort the incoming log messages based on their content and various parameters like the source host, application, and priority. You can create directories, files, and database tables dynamically using macros. Complex filtering using regular expressions and boolean operators offers almost unlimited flexibility to forward only the important log messages to the selected destinations.
The syslog-ng OSE application can segment log messages to named fields or columns, and also modify the values of these fields. You can process JSON messages, key-value pairs, and more.
To get the most information out of your log data, syslog-ng OSE allows you to correlate log messages and aggregate the extracted information into a single message. You can also use external information to enrich your log data.
The log data that your organization has to process, store, and review increases daily, so many organizations use big data solutions for their logs. To accomodate this huge amount of data, syslog-ng OSE natively supports storing log messages in HDFS files and Elasticsearch clusters.
Large organizations increasingly rely on queuing infrastructure to transfer their data. syslog-ng OSE supports Apache Kafka, the Advanced Message Queuing Protocol (AMQP), and the Simple Text Oriented Messaging Protocol (STOMP).
Storing your log messages in a database allows you to easily search and query the messages and interoperate with log analyzing applications. The syslog-ng application supports the following databases: MongoDB, MSSQL, MySQL, Oracle, PostgreSQL, and SQLite.
syslog-ng OSE also allows you to extract the information you need from your log data, and directly send it to your Graphite, Redis, or Riemann monitoring system.
syslog-ng not only supports legacy BSD syslog (RFC3164) and the enhanced RFC5424 protocols but also JavaScript Object Notation (JSON) and journald message formats.
The syslog-ng OSE application is the ideal choice to collect logs in massively heterogeneous environments using several different operating systems and hardware platforms, including Linux, Unix, BSD, Sun Solaris, HP-UX, Tru64, and AIX.
The syslog-ng application can operate in both IPv4 and IPv6 network environments, and can receive and send messages to both types of networks.
The syslog-ng application is not log analysis software. It can filter log messages and select only the ones matching certain criteria. It can even convert the messages and restructure them to a predefined format, or parse the messages and segment them into different fields. But syslog-ng cannot interpret and analyze the meaning behind the messages, or recognize patterns in the occurrence of different messages.
Log messages contain information about the events happening on the hosts. Monitoring system events is essential for security and system health monitoring reasons.
The original syslog protocol separates messages based on the priority of the message and the facility sending the message. These two parameters alone are often inadequate to consistently classify messages, as many applications might use the same facility, and the facility itself is not even included in the log message. To make things worse, many log messages contain unimportant information. The syslog-ng application helps you to select only the really interesting messages, and forward them to a central server.
Company policies or other regulations often require log messages to be archived. Storing the important messages in a central location greatly simplifies this process.
Version 3.16 of syslog-ng Open Source Edition includes the following main features.
The default-network-drivers() source is a special source that uses multiple source drivers to receive and parse several different types of syslog messages from the network. For details, see "default-network-drivers() source options" in the Administration Guide.
The Enterprise-wide message model or EWMM allows you to deliver structured messages from the initial receiving syslog-ng component right up to the central log server, through any number of hops. It does not matter if you parse the messages on the client, on a relay, or on the central server, their structured results will be available where you store the messages. Optionally, you can also forward the original raw message as the first syslog-ng component in your infrastructure has received it, which is important if you want to forward a message for example to a SIEM system. To make use of the enterprise-wide message model, you have to use the syslog-ng() destination on the sender side, and the default-network-drivers() source on the receiver side.
You can use if {}, elif {}, and else {} blocks to configure conditional expressions. For details, see Administration Guide.
syslog-ng OSE version 3.16 includes parsers for the sudo and iptables applications.
For a more detailed list, see Version 3.14 - 3.15 and the syslog-ng Releases page.
The hook-commands() option makes it possible to execute external programs when the relevant driver is initialized or torn down. It can be used with all source and destination drivers with the exception of the usertty() and internal() drivers. For details, see the option descriptions in the Administration Guide, and the hook-commands blog post.
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