I have a question on message parsing.

From my unterstanding, if syslog-ng receives a message that is not in the correct RFC 5424 format, it will just output it as is.

Does that mean that my application needs to generate the message in RFC 5424 format and syslog-ng will just process it? 

Or can syslog-ng be configured in such a way that an application just sends an unformatted string and syslog-ng will generate a valid RFC 5424 from it?

How are RFC 5424 structured data elements treated by syslog-ng? Can it be configured using macros to generate them or does the application need to send a valid mesage containing the structured data elements in the right format?

I am using syslog-ng 3.35.1.

Regards,
Stephan
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