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…

One of the highlights of the syslog-ng 4.3.0 release is parallelize(). Normally, syslog-ng processes incoming messages from a TCP connection in a single thread. While this works fine with many connections, it is a bottleneck when using a single or ve…

One of the returning questions I received recently: why contribute to the syslog-ng upstream? I guess it is a question many open-source projects receive regularly. There are many generic answers. Here I would like to focus more on syslog-ng, focusing…

The MongoDB destination of syslog-ng will receive another performance update. Starting with the upcoming version 4.3, it will support bulk operations. Depending on the configuration settings, this may result in a more than 300% performance increase. …

A few weeks ago, I posted about sngbench, a shell script to measure syslog-ng performance. The performance of syslog-ng is influenced by many factors, including the hardware and OS it runs on, and syslog-ng itself. This blog summarizes some of my fin…

No matter how awkward you feel when you hear about UDP syslog in the age of encrypted TCP connections, UDP syslog is here to stay in some special cases. The scalability issues of UDP log collection were first addressed in syslog-ng Open Source Editio…

One of the returning questions I receive is how many log messages can a given hardware handle. My typical answer is that it depends on the configuration. I have now an answer, or rather a tool to answer your question sngbench.sh. It is a shell script…

In version 4 of syslog-ng, the role of Python became even more important. Previously, all parts of syslog-ng could be extended using Python code, but no actual Python code was provided with syslog-ng. Version 4.0 added a Kubernetes module implemented…

Dear syslog-ng users, This is the 110th issue of syslog-ng Insider, a monthly newsletter that brings you syslog-ng-related news. NEWS Learning syslog-ng, the easier way Last year, one of the returning questions I received was how to learn syslog-…

Version 4 of syslog-ng was released last December. Quite a few people use it already in production. How can you install it for a test drive? It might be already available in your Linux distribution. There are also several unofficial repositories with…