Hello, We have all our windows servers/controllers send system messages (using snare) to our central log server which is a linux machine running syslog-ng. They are very verbose, multi line messages. Is there a way to have syslog-ng trim these down before the are wrote out to the log file? Or perhaps you know of another method I should be looking at? Thanks very much. here is a typical windows server message: Feb 1 16:08:31 10.111.1.11 MSWinEventLog 1 Security 5043398 Wed Feb 01 16:08:29 2012 4624 Microsoft-Windows-Security-Auditing NT AUTHORITY\ANONYMOUS LOGON N/A Success Audit AD02.domain.com Logon An account was successfully logged on. Subject: Security ID: S-1-0-0 Account Name: - Account Domain: - Logon ID: 0x0 Logon Type: 3 New Logon: Security ID: S-1-5-7 Account Name: ANONYMOUS LOGON Account Domain: NT AUTHORITY Logon ID: 0x45ab55d Logon GUID: {00000000-0000-0000-0000-000000000000} Process Information: Process ID: 0x0 Process Name: - Network Information: Workstation Name: AC010 Source Network Address: 10.101.2.44 Source Port: 60711 Detailed Authentication Information: Logon Process: NtLmSsp Authentication Package: NTLM Transited Services: - Package Name (NTLM only): NTLM V1 Key Length: 128 This event is generated when a logon session is created. It is generated on the computer that was accessed. The subject fields indicate the account on the local system which requested the logon. This is most commonly a service such as the Server service, or a local process such as Winlogon.exe or Services.exe. The logon type field indicates the kind of logon that occurred. The most common types are 2 (interactive) and 3 (network). The New Logon fields indicate the account for whom the new logon was created, i.e. the account that was logged on. The network fields indicate where a remote logon request originated. Workstation name is not always available and may be left blank in some cases. The authentication information fields provide detailed information about this specific logon request. - Logon GUID is a unique identifier that can be used to correlate this event with a KDC event. - Transited services indicate which intermediate services have participated in this logon request. - Package name indicates which sub-protocol was used among the NTLM protocols. - Key length indicates the length of the generated session key. This will be 0 if no session key was requested. 5040030 I'd like to parse out the redundant data which is in every similar message, several times a second... the ultimate goal would be for that message to be trimmed down to: Feb 1 16:08:31 10.111.1.11 5043398 4624 Microsoft-Windows-Security-Auditing NT AUTHORITY\ANONYMOUS LOGON N/A Success Audit AD02.domain.com Logon Workstation Name: AC110 Source Network Address: 10.101.2.110 Source Port: 60711 or similar... I can define aregx to do this, but I am not sure where the best place would be to intercept and parse this before it is wrote out, or if syslog-ng has the parts to allow this to happen. thanks for your time, greg