We are always looking for new ways to store log messages. Quickwit is a new contender, designed for log storage, and among others, it also provides an Elasticsearch-compatible API. From this blog, you can learn about Quickwit, and how to forward log messages from syslog-ng to it using the Elasticsearch-compatible API. Read more at https://www.syslog-ng.com/community/b/blog/posts/first-steps-with-quickwit-and-syslog-ng syslog-ng logo

OpenObserve has an Elasticsearch compatible API for log ingestion, but syslog-ng is not mentioned in the documentation. My plan was to document how to modify the syslog-ng elasticsearch-http() destination, based on API documentation. However, as it turned out, OpenObserve has a ready to use syslog-ng configuration example in the web UI. https://www.syslog-ng.com/community/b/blog/posts/sending-logs-to-openobserve-using-syslog-ng syslog-ng logo

Version 4.0 of syslog-ng is right around the corner. It hasn’tyet been released; however, you can already try some of its features. The largest and most interesting change is type support. Right now, name-value pairs within syslog-ng are represented as text, even if the PatternDB or JSON parsers could see the actual type of the incoming data. This does not change, but starting with 4.0, syslog-ng will keep the type information, and use it correctly on the destination side.

General availability of Elasticsearch 8 was announced last week. There were quite a few rumors that it will break compatibility with third party tools. I tested it as soon as I had a little time: I am happy to share that anything I tested with the elasticsearch-http() destination of syslog-ng still seems to work perfectly well with the latest version of Elasticsearch. You can read the rest of my blog at https://www.

The Elastic Cloud is a service by Elastic providing Elasticsearch and related services in an easy-to-use package. Last year someone reported an issue that it does not work properly with syslog-ng. I did not have time to investigate at that time. Now I started a free trial and soon my log messages from syslog-ng started to appear in Kibana in Elastic Cloud. From this blog you can learn how to configure syslog-ng for the Elastic Cloud.

There is a new drop-in replacement for Elasticsearch, at least if you don’t mind the limitations and the alpha status. However, it definitely lives up to the promise that it provides an Elasticsearch-compatible API for data ingestion. I tested it with the elasticsearch-http() destination of syslog-ng, and it worked perfectly after I modified the URL in the configuration example I found. So, what is Zinc? It is a search engine written in Go that provides an Elasticsearch-compatible API for data ingestion.

One of the most popular destinations in syslog-ng is Elasticsearch. Due to the license change of the Elastic stack, some people changed quickly to Grafana/Loki and other technologies. However, most syslog-ng users decided to wait and see. Version 1.0.0 of OpenSearch, a fork of the Elastic code base from before the license change is now available. Elastic also published a new release last week. For this blog, I tested the latest and greatest from both product lines and I’m sharing my experiences.