Dear syslog-ng users, This is the 75th issue of syslog-ng Insider, a monthly newsletter that brings you syslog-ng-related news. NEWS Building blocks of syslog-ng Recently I gave a syslog-ng introductory workshop at Pass the SALT conference in Lille, …

Recently, a number of quite complex configurations came up while syslog-ng users were asking for advice. Some of these configurations were even pushing the limits of syslog-ng (regarding the maximum number of configuration objects). As it turned out,…

Version 7 of the Elastic stack was released a few months ago, and brought several breaking changes that affect syslog-ng. In my previous blog post, I gave details about how it affects sending GeoIP information to Elasticsearch. From this blog post yo…

One of the most popular destinations of syslog-ng is Elasticsearch. Any time a new language binding was introduced to syslog-ng, someone implemented an Elasticsearch destination for it. For many years, the official Elasticsearch destination for syslo…

Elasticsearch is gaining momentum as the ultimate destination for log messages. There are two major reasons for this: You can store arbitrary name-value pairs coming from structured logging or message parsing. You can use Kibana as a search and v…

Recently I gave a syslog-ng introductory workshop at Pass the SALT conference in Lille, France. I got a lot of positive feedback, so I decided to turn all that feedback into a blog post. Naturally, I shortened and simplified it, but still managed to …

Version 7 of the Elastic Stack, packed with new features and improved performance, has now been available for some time. Elasticsearch is not the only one to have come up with a major new version recently: starting with version 3.21, syslog-ng featur…

Dear syslog-ng users, This is the 74th issue of syslog-ng Insider, a monthly newsletter that brings you syslog-ng-related news. NEWS Format your log messages in Python Sometimes getting log messages into the desired format can be a problem, but wi…

Google Stackdriver collects and analyses logs, events and metrics of your infrastructure. Using syslog-ng PE 7.0.14 or later, you can send your logs to Google Stackdriver. While originally designed to quickly respond to events in the Google Cloud Pla…

For many years, anything I wrote about syslog-ng and Elasticsearch was valid for all available versions. Well, not anymore. With version 7 of Elasticsearch, there are some breaking changes. These changes are mostly related to the fact that Elastic is…

Why use syslog-ng to alert on sudo events? At the moment, alerting in sudo is limited to E-mail. Using syslog-ng, however, you can send alerts (more precisely, selected logs) to a wide variety of destinations. Logs from sudo are automatically parsed …

Recently I visited two conferences: LOADays and Red Hat Summit. They both focus on open source software, but similarities end there. LOADays in Antwerp is small, free and focuses on Linux administrators. The Red Hat Summit in Boston is huge, expensiv…