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Using syslog transmission to store XALT data in a syslog aggregator

2015-09-17
2015-09-17
  • Aaron Hicks

    Aaron Hicks - 2015-09-17

    Has it been considered that the syslog transmission style could be used to send XALT entries to a syslog aggregator like splunk, Loggly, Logstash or Greylog. These could be used to store the raw events (with other logging data) and extracted via a query to the aggregators API.

    Extraction could be a specific query, or to harvest the entries to go into the XALT database, however I can see that it may be beneficial to not use the XALT database and to figure out how to query the log aggregator directly.

     
    • Mark R. Fahey

      Mark R. Fahey - 2015-09-17

      Aaron,

      We (Robert and myself - XALT developers) have focused on the library and
      executable launch tracking primarily. We originally had only planned to
      do the simple file transfer method, but then we realized that making the
      transfer mechanism arbitrary so we could support direct to database, file
      transfer, and our syslog method was the way to go. We also realized that
      by doing so, it would be relatively easy (just time and effort) to support
      other transfer mechanisms.

      Having said that, I think you are talking about the phase where we
      “scrape” the syslog files and move the data to the database and instead
      propose using a syslog aggregator (I am assuming the data still goes to
      syslog first). No, we did not explicitly talk about using a syslog
      aggregator, but it would be easy to support in my opinion since it would
      be simple to just not use the existing scraping script and use say write
      another script to move/copy the data to the aggregator instead. And then
      all the queries can be done in the aggregator.

      If you don’t want the data to go to syslog first and you want one of these
      aggregators to collect the data (skipping syslog), then you probably need
      to write a new “transmission” function — I bet it would look a lot like
      the syslog method. The thing about the syslog method is that a lot of
      that is set up outside of XALT in the syslog configuration files. So you
      might do the same kind of configuration for another tool, and then make
      sure the transmission method logs to the new tools. It is probably more
      complicated than this, but at a high level that should be roughly how it
      would work.

      If others have discussed this for XALT, I am not aware.

      -----Original Message-----
      From: Aaron Hicks aethylred@users.sf.net
      Reply-To: "[xalt:discussion]" general@discussion.xalt.p.re.sf.net
      Date: Wednesday, September 16, 2015 at 8:46 PM
      To: "[xalt:discussion]" general@discussion.xalt.p.re.sf.net
      Subject: [xalt:discussion] Using syslog transmission to store XALT data in
      a syslog aggregator

      Has it been considered that the syslog transmission style could be used
      to send XALT entries to a syslog aggregator like splunk, Loggly, Logstash
      or Greylog. These could be used to store the raw events (with other
      logging data) and extracted via a query to the aggregators API.

      Extraction could be a specific query, or to harvest the entries to go
      into the XALT database, however I can see that it may be beneficial to
      not use the XALT database and to figure out how to query the log
      aggregator directly.


      Using syslog transmission to store XALT data in a syslog
      aggregator


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