syslog-ng Premium Edition 6.0.21 - Administration Guide

Description: Include the path to the directory where you copied the required libraries (see Procedure 7.6, “Prerequisites”), for example, client_lib_dir(/user/share/kafka/lib).

Description: This option enables putting outgoing messages into the disk buffer of the destination to avoid message loss in case of a system failure on the destination side. It has the following options:

Options reliable() and disk-buf-size() are required options.

destination d_demo {
    network(
            "127.0.0.1"
            port(3333)
            disk-buffer(
                mem-buf-size(10000)
                disk-buf-size(2000000)
                reliable(yes)
                dir("/tmp/disk-buffer")
            )
        );
};

destination d_demo {
    network(
            "127.0.0.1"
            port(3333)
            disk-buffer(
                mem-buf-length(10000)
                disk-buf-size(2000000)
                reliable(no)
                dir("/tmp/disk-buffer")
            )
        );
};

Description: Specifies the hostname or IP address of the Kafka server. When specifying an IP address, IPv4 (for example, 192.168.0.1) or IPv6 (for example, [::1]) can be used as well. Use a colon (:) after the address to specify the port number of the server. When specifying multiple addresses, use a comma to separate the addresses, for example, kafka-bootstrap-servers("127.0.0.1:2525,remote-server-hostname:6464")

Description: The syslog-ng application can store fractions of a second in the timestamps according to the ISO8601 format. The frac-digits() parameter specifies the number of digits stored. The digits storing the fractions are padded by zeros if the original timestamp of the message specifies only seconds. Fractions can always be stored for the time the message was received. Note that syslog-ng can add the fractions to non-ISO8601 timestamps as well.

Description: Controls what happens when type-casting fails and syslog-ng PE cannot convert some data to the specified type. By default, syslog-ng PE drops the entire message and logs the error. Currently the value-pairs() option uses the settings of on-error().

Description: The key of the partition under which the message is published. You can use templates to change the topic dynamically based on the source or the content of the message, for example, key("${PROGRAM}").

Description: The number of messages that the output queue can store.

Description: The absolute path and filename of the Kafka properties file to load. For example, properties_file("/opt/syslog-ng/etc/kafka_dest.properties"). The syslog-ng PE application reads this file and passes the properties to the Kafka Producer. If a property is defined both in the syslog-ng PE configuration file (syslog-ng.conf) and in the properties file, then syslog-ng PE uses the definition from the syslog-ng PE configuration file.

The syslog-ng PE kafka destination supports all properties of the official Kafka producer. For details, see the Apache Kafka documentation.

The kafka-bootstrap-servers option is translated to the bootstrap.servers property.

For example, the following properties file defines the acknowledgement method and compression:

acks=all
compression.type=snappy

Description: The number of times syslog-ng PE attempts to send a message to this destination. If syslog-ng PE could not send a message, it will try again until the number of attempts reaches retries, then drops the message.

Description: The message as published to Apache Kafka. You can use templates and template functions (for example, format-json()) to format the message, for example, template("$(format-json --scope rfc5424 --exclude DATE --key ISODATE)").

For details on formatting messages in JSON format, see the section called “format-json”.

Description: Sets the maximum number of messages sent to the destination per second. Use this output-rate-limiting functionality only when using disk-buffer as well to avoid the risk of losing messages. Specifying 0 or a lower value sets the output limit to unlimited.

Description: The Kafka topic under which the message is published. You can use templates to change the topic dynamically based on the source or the content of the message, for example, topic("${HOST}").

Description: When sync_send is set to true, syslog-ng PE sends the message reliably: it sends a message to the Kafka server, then waits for a reply. In case of failure, syslog-ng PE repeats sending the message, as set in the retries() parameter. If sending the message fails for retries() times, syslog-ng PE drops the message.

This method ensures reliable message transfer, but is very slow.

When sync_send is set to false, syslog-ng PE sends messages asynchronously, and receives the response asynchronously. In case of a problem, syslog-ng PE cannot resend the messages.

This method is fast, but the transfer is not reliable. Several thousands of messages can be lost before syslog-ng PE recognizes the error.

Description: Convert timestamps to the timezone specified by this option. If this option is not set, then the original timezone information in the message is used. Converting the timezone changes the values of all date-related macros derived from the timestamp, for example, HOUR. For the complete list of such macros, see the section called “Date-related macros”.

The timezone can be specified as using the name of the (for example time-zone("Europe/Budapest")), or as the timezone offset in +/-HH:MM format (for example +01:00). On Linux and UNIX platforms, the valid timezone names are listed under the /usr/share/zoneinfo directory.

Description: Override the global timestamp format (set in the global ts-format() parameter) for the specific destination. For details, see the section called “A note on timezones and timestamps”.