The first alpha of
syslog-ng 3.4 was released more than a
year ago, and the first stable release
earlier this year, development on
syslog-ng 3.5 has been going on steadlily since then, with a lot of interesting features and changes pouring in. While the 3.5 release will not bring as many overwhelming changes as the previous two releases did, the sheer number of improvements is still substantial. Our focus was on smaller developments all over the place this time, instead of big sweeping changes. In this post, we will go over most of these features, with use-cases, examples and a few words about why they are so useful and awesome.
Multi-line support,
new destinations,
new template functions,
type hinting,
unit suffixes, and
other things. Read on, and be amazed!These are only bigger features, there has been a lot of small tweaking going on, and of course, all of the fixes that went into prior versions will also be in 3.5 too, and there's still a chance that something else may find its way in before the feature freeze.
Multi-line supportOne of the major new features in the 3.5 release will be support for multi-line messages, a feature that has been available in
syslog-ng PE for a good while, and which has been ported to and improved upon to the open source edition. Two variants of multi-line are supported, which will be detailed below. Both of them are available for the
file() and
pipe() sources only.Indented multi-lineThe easiest variant is indented multi-line, where each line can be followed by others, indented by whitespace, and the message continues until the first non-indented line. This is the format used by the Linux kernel too, from version 3.5, for
/dev/log. This type of multi-line can be used as follows:
source s_multiline file("/path/to/file" multi-line-mode(indented)); ;Consider that
/path/to/file has the following content:
First line
Continuation 1;
Continuation 2;
Second line
With the
indented multi-line-mode() setting, this would turn into two log messages:
First line\n Continuation 1;\n Continuation 2;
Second line
Regexp-based multilineIf multi-line input is not based on indentation, one can use the
regexp multi-line-mode() instead, which makes two new settings available:
multi-line-prefix() and
multi-line-garbage(). These can be used to define the start and the end of a log message: any string between a the beginning matching prefix and a matching garbage will be considered a single message. That is, the prefix will be included, the garbage will not be: it will be discarded.To illustrate:
source s_multiline
file("/path/to/file" multi-line-mode(regexp)
multi-line-prefix("^prefix")
multi-line-garbage(" garbage$"));
;If the source contains these lines:
prefix message
continuing garbage
This will turn into the following log message:
prefix message\ncontinuing
New destinationsIt would be pretty hard to do a syslog-ng release without new destinations, and with 3.5, we will have three of them!STOMPWhile we had AMQP before, we now have a
STOMP destination too, so we can stream logs to any STOMP server, with a few simple lines:
stomp(
host("localhost")
port(61613)
destination("/topic/syslog")
routing_key("")
persistent(yes)
ack(no)
username("someone")
password("something")
body("This is the body! YAY! Here's a message: $MESSAGE!\n")
value-pairs(scope(nv-pairs, syslog-proto, selected-macros))
)Of course, none of these settings need to be set, you can just use the defaults, and it will just work!RiemannDid you know that syslog-ng is far more than a log collector and processor? No? You do now. When you have access to a lot of logs, and a tremendous amount of power in parsing them, you can use these tools for monitoring easily! And when we're talking monitoring,
riemann is a great asset in our toolbox, and with the new destination, we can easily forward metrics to it:
riemann(
server("localhost")
port(5555)
host("$HOST")
service("$PROGRAM")
description("$PROGRAM pids")
metric(int("$PID"))
ttl(300)
);Of course, the above is a very silly example, it would make much more sense to extract data from a log message instead, but this will serve as an example.
New template functions
$(upper-case TEXT...), $(lower-case TEXT...)-
To turn some text into *upper-* or *lower-case*, these two template
functions come in handy. They simply turn all their arguments into
the respecitve case.
$(delimit DELIMITERS NEW-DELIMITER TEXT)-
Sometimes one has a delimited string, where one wishes to replace
the delimiters. This function does just that: give it a list of
delimiters (you may need to quote it, if it contains whitespace), a
replacement, and a text to replace delimiters in, and it does the
rest.
For example, to replace tabs and spaces with a vertical bar, one
could write a template like this:
template("$(delimit \"\t \" \" \" $MESSAGE)\n")
$(env VARIABLE...)-
Have you ever felt the need to check an environment variable from
within syslog-ng? I did, and now I can.
Type hintingWhile syslog-ng supported sending log messages into various data stores and message queues for a while (SQL at first, MongoDB, JSON and AMQP later), even when those supported different types of data than strings, we could not do anything else. Until now. It is now possible - at places where it makes sense - to annotate templates with type hints, which the destination driver can optionally use. Type hinting is implemented for the
mongodb() destination and the
$(format-json) template function for now. When no type hint is specified, syslog-ng defaults to
string.To add type hints, simply wrap the respective template with the hinted type, like this:
mongodb(
value-pairs(pair("date", datetime("$UNIXDATE"))
pair("pid", int64("$PID")))
);Currently the following type hints exist:
boolean (anything that begins with a
t or
1 is true, anything that begins with
f or
0 is false, everything else is an error),
string,
literal (same as string, but not quoted if it would be quoted otherwise),
int32 (
int is an alias for this),
int64, and
datetime. Only UNIX timestamps can be type-hinted to
datetime, anything else will likely result in a casting error.It is also possible to control what happens when type casting fails: syslog-ng can drop the whole message, drop the property, or fall back to string. It can also do all of these silently:
options
typecast(on-error(silently-drop-property));
;
Using this feature with
$(format-json) is very similary too:
$(format-json date=datetime("$UNIXDATE") pid=int64("$PID"))With this feature in place, you can now store your non-string values with their proper types!
Unit suffixesUnit suffixes make it considerably easier to set limits and describe numbers within the syslog-ng configuration. We no longer need to spell out sizes to the byte precious, it is now enough to write:
log-fifo-size(200MiB). Now, syslog-ng will understand suffixes for kilo-, mega-, and giga-bytes, (
K,
M,
G, respectively) either in base-10 or base-2 (with an extra
i after the suffix). One can also omit the trailing
b from the end.So, to set the
log-fifo-size() to
2097152 bytes, one can simply use
2MiB. Or, to set it to
2000000,
2Mb. That's a whole lot easier, isn't it? No more counting zeros, no more silly typos in a ten-digit number, no more pain, but easily readable units!
Miscellaneous featuresApart from the features above, there have been a lot of other changes and improvements in the code base:
-
We now have a (mostly) non-recursive, quiet build system, which is
not only much faster than what we had before, but more reliable too,
and easier to glance through its logs, too.
-
A few old settings that were never used were removed (the
username() and password() settings of the
mongodb() driver), some were renamed and deprecated:
the replace() key transformation function of
value-pairs() was renamed to
replace-prefix(), as that makes the intent clearer. In
this latter case, the old name is still valid, but obsoleted.
-
Our integration with systemd is
much tighter now: syslog-ng can notify systemd when it is ready.
This also means that when systemd support is enabled, certain
systemd libraries will have to be installed: syslog-ng no longer
carries a convenience copy.
-
A new filter was implemented:
in-list, with which one
can implement efficient white- or blacklists.
To use it, you will need a file with one value a line, and do
something along these lines:
filter f_whitelist
in-list("/path/to/file.list", value("PROGRAM"));
;
To do a blacklist, just negate the filter:
filter f_blacklist
not in-list("/path/to/file.list", value("HOST"));
;
-
syslog-ng now supports Linux 3.5+-style
/dev/kmsg, and
will use that instead of /proc/kmsg when a sufficiently
recent kernel is detected (assuming one is using the
system() source).
The new kernel log format supports structured messages, and
syslog-ng is smart enough to parse them, and make them accessible
like all other message properties (with a .linux. prefix).
It seems I'm catching up with the pace of this course I'm following and that is compelling me to go back to posting on my blog, Arte y cultura en circulaci n: crear y compartir en tiempos digitales .
This week's lesson is (again, in Spanish) Las fronteras del remix (the boundaries of remixes). An interesting text, open to everybody (regardless of whether you are signed up for the course or, I hope, whether time has passed since the course took place).
And this week's homework is to find "our favorite" non-original work (I picked one among my favorite works And, yes, this is partly because I am part of the "club" of deniers of true originality: We cannot create anything without being part of a surrounding culture, without a common heritage and language with which we speak to our audience) and to find something about it, anything considered important or significative as to its antecedents. What do I like about this work, what grabs my attention. Do I consider it to be a true new creative work? Why?
I am taking as an example Leo Masliah, an Uruguayan writer and musician (writer and interpreter). I have followed and enjoyed Masliah's work since 1996, and although by far I'm most familiar with his musical works, I have two books (a novel and a series of short stories). Among his facets, I most enjoy the acid, nihilistic/dadaistic streaks. I chose three of his songs to talk about I am linking to anonline resource where possible, but uploading the three songs to this blog to make his work better known, so that people understand what I talk about, and with my best intentions. Of course, if there is any request to remove the material, I will do it right away. I hope this can be seen as fair/academic use, although this blog is somewhat widely read.
Yesterday, I pushed my first sizable contribution to GHC, the Haskell compiler. The feature solves the problem that newtypes are not always free: If we have newtype Age = MkAge Int, then we have all learned that the Age function has zero run-time cost. But if the Int that we want to convert is inside another type, the conversion is no longer free: Converting a Maybe Int to a Maybe Age using, for example, fmap Age, will cause time and space overhead at runtime, and there was no way around it. Well, there is unsafeCoerce, but really, that ought to be avoided.
So after some discussion with and encouragement of Simon Peyton Jones at 
Hi always wondered what the most popular options are, you usually find in 
Anything is possible, you could even end up 
The blog engine 
I *did* some hacking at DebConf, as usual. For once, I had no TODO
list: after all, I never complete these, so why make one?
Still, I participated to discussions around samba packaging, mostly
animated by Ivo De Decker and I think we're making good progress
towards samba 4.x packages. The road is long, quite complicated, but
we now have a stronger team, with a very active Ivo, Jeroen Dekkers
who officially joined, Steve Langasek who still cherishes one of his
pet packages (and even branched in our git with the Ubuntu packages).
Great work and thanks to Ivo for pushing this forward.
I also worked quite actively on the migration of fonts packages to git
(I now reached the point where I'm more comfortable with git than SVN,
yes, everything can happen). These packages were modernized at the
same time and checked for new upstream versions (I have to say that
few of these fonts had new upstream versions, indeed). We
unfortunately found no time to have a good font BoF in Vaumarcus,
indeed...but I'm not sure we would have many things to say. The work
is done and done well, in this team.
Some progress was made, also, for restoring a working "monolithic"
build of D-I. This build gathers together all udebs from unstable,
which means it offers a D-I image that uses ALL udebs from
nustable.....which is not the default of other images. This would be
very helpful for translators who want to check their work as soon as
possible. In the future, with a Jenkins task that would build each
package at each commit and then build a monolithic image, we could
have a way to provide a tes snapshot of D-I git repos.....which could
help catching more bugs (or more of my stupid mistakes).
So, in general, I consider this a quite successful DebConf when it
comes at "real" production.
When starting a new 
Very long post ahead (sorry for the wall of text), part of a series of posts on some sysadmin topics, see