There are many ways you can collect log messages using syslog-ng and forward them to Splunk. In this blog I collect the history of Splunk support in syslog-ng, and the advantages and disadvantages of various solutions, both open source and commercial…

Logging is not just syslog anymore. Still, many syslog-ng users stick to using one of the syslog protocols for log transport and flat files for log storage. While most SIEMs and log analytics tools can receive syslog messages or read them using their…

Dear syslog-ng users, This is the 113th issue of syslog-ng Insider, a monthly newsletter that brings you syslog-ng-related news. NEWS Why contribute to syslog-ng upstream? One of the returning questions I received recently: why contribute to the …

Network traffic is expensive in the cloud, and even a single syslog-ng instance can easily saturate the full bandwidth of a network connection. Compressing HTTP traffic was introduced in syslog-ng Version 4.4.0 and depending on your use case, you can…

You can read about many interesting syslog-ng features in my blogs. However, it can happen that when you want to try them at home, you fail because the feature is missing. How can you solve such problems? In this blog, I discuss some of the possible …

Creating highly available servers is difficult. Sending logs to two (or more) servers and hoping that at least one of them can collect logs any time is a lot easier. Since network traffic and storage are cheap, redundancy is usually not a problem. Ho…

Dear syslog-ng users, This is the 112th issue of syslog-ng Insider, a monthly newsletter that brings you syslog-ng-related news. NEWS The syslog-ng MongoDB destination receives bulk operations support The MongoDB destination of syslog-ng will recei…

A question was asked if syslog-ng can send logs to OpenObserve. It has an Elasticsearch compatible API for log ingestion, but syslog-ng is not mentioned in the documentation. My plan was to document how to modify the syslog-ng elasticsearch-http() de…

This year I started publishing a syslog-ng tutorial series both on my blog and on YouTube: https://peter.czanik.hu/posts/syslog-ng-tutorial-toc/ And while the series was praised as the best possible introduction to syslog-ng, viewers also mentioned t…

Even if most people ask me to compare systemd-journald vs. syslog-ng, I would say that they complement each other. Systemd-journald excels at collecting local log messages, including those of various system services. The focus of syslog-ng is on cent…

Many users are annoyed by the version number included in the syslog-ng configuration. However, it ensures backward compatibility in syslog-ng. It is especially useful when updating to syslog-ng 4 from version 3, but also when updating within the same…

Dear syslog-ng users, This is the 111th issue of syslog-ng Insider, a monthly newsletter that brings you syslog-ng-related news. NEWS Introducing sngbench: a shell script to performance test your syslog-ng One of the returning questions I receive is…