Today we’re announcing syslog-ng Premium Edition 7.0.2, our latest stable release for syslog-ng PE. We crammed a couple great new features in this release: a streamlined and easy-to-integrate self-monitoring tool, and Python support for message parsers and template functions.
Easier and more effective monitoring
The new monitoring source in syslog-ng Premium Edition allows you to granularly select which statistics of syslog-ng PE you want to monitor. In addition, the statistics are available as structured name-value pairs, so you can format the output similarly to other log messages. That way, you can easily convert the statistics and metrics, for example, into JSON or WELF format, and send the results into your enterprise monitoring solution (for example IMB Tivoli Netcool, Riemann, Redis, or Graphite). For details, check out the Administrator Guide.
syslog-ng PE 7.0.2 also includes the monitoring-welf source, which is a preconfigured monitoring() source that generates statistics messages in WELF format. Starting with version 7.0, syslog-ng
PE uses this driver for new installations to generate statistics (earlier versions use the internal) source for this purpose).
Python support: message parsers and template functions
The Python Log Parser allows you to write your own parser in Python. Practically, that way you can process the log message (or parts of the log message) any way you need. For example, you can import external Python modules to process the messages, query databases to enrich the messages with additional data, and many other things. For details, see the Administrator Guide.
You can write your own template function in Python as well. You can define a Python block in your syslog-ng PE configuration file, and define one or more Python functions in it. You can use these functions as template functions.
As usual, you can find all relevant documentation on this page.
