This section describes the format of a syslog message, according to the legacy-syslog or BSD-syslog protocol. A syslog message consists of the following parts:

The total message cannot be longer than 1024 bytes.

The following is a sample syslog message:

<133>Feb 25 14:09:07 webserver syslogd: restart

The message corresponds to the following format:

<priority>timestamp hostname application: message

The different parts of the message are explained in the following sections.

NOTE: The syslog-ng Open Source Edition (syslog-ng OSE) application supports longer messages as well. For details, see the log-msg-size() option in Global options. However, it is not recommended to enable messages larger than the packet size when using UDP destinations.