RSyslog - Features
This page lists both current features as well as those being considered
for future versions of rsyslog. If you think a feature is missing, drop
Rainer a note. Rsyslog is a vital
project. Features are added each few days. If you would like to keep up of what
is going on, you can also subscribe to the rsyslog mailing list.
Current Features
- native support for writing to MySQL databases
-
native support for writing to Postgres databases
- support for (plain) tcp
based syslog - much better reliability
- support for sending and receiving
compressed syslog messages
- ability to configure backup syslog/database
servers - if the primary fails, control is switched to a prioritized list of
backups
- support for receiving messages via
reliable
RFC 3195 delivery
- ability to generate file names and directories (log targets)
dynamically, based on many different properties
- control of log output format,
including ability to present channel and priority as visible log data
- good timestamp format control; at a minimum, ISO 8601/RFC 3339
second-resolution UTC zone
- ability to reformat message contents and work with substrings
- support for
log files larger than 2gb
- support for file size limitation and automatic
rollover command execution
- support for running multiple rsyslogd
instances on a single machine
- support for
ssl-protected syslog (via stunnel)
- ability to filter on any part of
the message, not just facility and severity
- ability to use regular
expressions in filters
- support for discarding
messages based on filters
- ability to execute shell scripts on received
messages
- control of whether the local hostname or the hostname of the
origin of the data is shown as the hostname in the output
- ability to
preserve the original hostname in NAT environments and relay chains
- ability to limit the allowed network senders
- powerful BSD-style
hostname and program name blocks for easy multi-host support
-
multi-threaded (is
this important? why?)
- very
experimental and volatile support for syslog-protocol
compliant messages (it is volatile because standardization is currently
underway and this is a proof-of-concept implementation to aid this effort)
-
experimental support for syslog-transport-tls based framing on syslog/tcp
connections
-
a copy of klogd.c has been included under the name of rklogd for those Linux
systems that need one. So rsyslog is a full replacement for the sysklogd
package
-
support for IPv6
-
ability to control repeated line reduction ("last message repeated n times")
on a per selector-line basis
-
supports sub-configuration files, which can be automatically read from
directories. Includes are specified in the main configuration file
-
supports multiple actions per selector/filter condition
-
MySQL and Postgres SQL functionality as a dynamically loadable plug-in
-
support for GSS-API
-
modular design for outputs - easily extensible
Upcoming Features
The list below is something like a repository of ideas we'd like to
implement. Features on this list are typically NOT scheduled for immediate
inclusion. We maintain a
feature
request tracker at our bugzilla. This tracker has things typically within
reach of implementation. Users are encouraged to submit feature requests there
(or via our forums). Please note that rsyslog v2 is feature-complete. New
features will be implemented in the v3 branch only. Version 3 already has a
number of very exciting additional features.
To see when each feature was added, see the
rsyslog change log (online
only).