Release Notes

syslog-ng Open Source Edition 3.16

Release Notes

July 2018

These release notes provide information about the syslog-ng Open Source Edition release.

Supported platforms

The syslog-ng Open Source Edition application is highly portable and is known to run on a wide range of hardware architectures (x86, x86_64, SUN Sparc, PowerPC 32 and 64, Alpha) and operating systems, including Linux, BSD, Solaris, IBM AIX, HP-UX, Mac OS X, Cygwin, Tru64, and others.

• The source code of syslog-ng Open Source Edition is released under the GPLv2 license and is available on GitHub.

• See the list of precompiled syslog-ng OSE binary packages.

New Features

What is new in syslog-ng Open Source Edition 3.16?

Version 3.16 of syslog-ng Open Source Edition includes the following main features.

Easily receive and parse messages from remote hosts

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.

Transfer log messages and their key-value pairs between syslog-ng nodes

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.

Clearer configuration using if, else, elif conditions

You can use if {}, elif {}, and else {} blocks to configure conditional expressions. For details, see Administration Guide.

Message parsing

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.

Execute external programs during startup

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.

Resolved Issues

For a detailed list of issues resolved in this release, see syslog-ng Releases page.