syslog-ng Premium Edition 7.0.19 - Release Notes

Enriching data

You can use an external database file to append custom name-value pairs to incoming logs, thus extending, enriching, and complementing the data found in the log message. For example, you can create a database (or export it from an existing tool) that contains a list of hostnames or IP addresses, and the department of your organization that the host belongs to, the role of the host (mailserver, webserver, and so on), or similar contextual information. For details, see "Enriching log messages with external data" in the Administration Guide.

You can correlate and aggregate information from log messages using a few simple filters that are similar to SQL GROUPBY statements. You do not even have to configure a pattern database. Also, when correlating messages containing numerical information, you can use numerical template functions that work on numerical values of a correlation context. For details, see "Correlating log messages" in the Administration Guide and "Template functions of syslog-ng PE" in the Administration Guide.

Improved configuration flexibility

You can define configuration objects inline, where they are actually used, without having to define them in a separate object. This is useful if you need an object only once, for example, a filter or a rewrite rule, because it makes the configuration much easier to read. Every object can be defined inline: sources, destinations, filters, parsers, rewrite rules, and so on. For details, see "Defining configuration objects inline" in the Administration Guide.

From now on, every configuration object is a log expression. Every configuration object is essentially a configuration block, and can include multiple objects. To reference the block, only the top-level object must be referenced. That way you can use embedded log statements, junctions and in-line object definitions within source, destination, filter, rewrite and parser definitions. For example, a source can include a rewrite rule to modify the messages received by the source, and that combination can be used as a simple source in a log statement. For details, see "Using channels in configuration objects" in the Administration Guide.

To make the configuration more readable, and to help avoid misconfiguration, you can use human-readable units when setting configuration options, for example, log-fifo-size(2Mb). For details, see "Notes about the configuration syntax" in the Administration Guide.

Other changes

• The default value of log-msg-size() is 8192 instead of 65536. Increase it if needed.

• The skip-cluster-health-check() option is available for the elasticsearch2() destination. For details, see "Elasticsearch2 destination options (DEPRECATED)" in the Administration Guide.

• The qdisk-dir option of syslog-ng PE is not available as a command-line option, use the dir() option of disk-buffer() in the configuration of the destination instead.

• Several features and platforms that are available in syslog-ng Premium Edition 6 LTS are not yet available in syslog-ng PE 7. For details, see Differences in features between syslog-ng PE 6 LTS and 7.