Syslog-ng - Features

Features

syslog-ng provides a number of features other than transporting syslog messages and storing them to plain text log files:

• the ability to format log messages using UNIX shell-like variable expansion (can break cross-platform log format compatibility);
• the use of this shell-like variable expansion when naming files, covering multiple destination files with a single statement;
• the ability to send log messages to local applications;
• ability to message flow-control in network transport;
• logging directly into a database (since syslog-ng OSE 2.1);
• rewrite portions of the syslog message with set and substitute primitives (since syslog-ng OSE 3.0);
• classify incoming log messages and at the same time extract structured information from the unstructured syslog message (since syslog-ng OSE 3.0);
• generic name-value support: each message is just a set of name-value pairs, which can be used to store extra information (since syslog-ng OSE 3.0);
• the ability to process structured message formats transmitted over syslog, like extract columns from CSV formatted lines (since syslog-ng OSE 3.0);
• the ability to correlate multiple incoming messages to form a more complex, correlated event (since syslog-ng OSE 3.2);