One of the chalenges you will face with XML and syslog is that XML can not be validated until all of the input has been XML parsed. If you have a 1GB XML file, your XML parser will probably read the entire thing into RAM. Perhaps that works for you, but with our 4GB log file, the XML parsing and internal data storage overhead, this could easily consume 8GB of RAM. When you indicate that you need to put this on the WEB, you will find that XML of large data will bring your web server to its knees. Parsing through 1GB of data to return a line or two will be very CPU intensive, and on a clickable (web) setup, this will be repeated often. I also think you someone at your site has a fever, and I hope they seek some prfessional advice rather than self-diagnosing the issue :-) Evan. Padmanabhan, Rajeesh (GE Healthcare) wrote:
Hi Alex,
Thanks a lot for your quick response. Infact my role here to act as 'Tech-monkey' :) I have a syslog-ng clients & server. Clients should be able to transfer logs in xml format to server. & server stores in a local location(xml file). Idea is to upload this to web & backup, which can read data in xml fomat. Could you please explain me to create a template that generate logs in xml format.
Cheers! Rajeesh
-----Original Message----- From: syslog-ng-bounces@lists.balabit.hu [mailto:syslog-ng-bounces@lists.balabit.hu] On Behalf Of Alexander Clouter Sent: Sunday, February 11, 2007 4:21 PM To: Syslog-ng users' and developers' mailing list Subject: Re: [syslog-ng] How to convert syslog-ng logs into xml format
Hi,
Padmanabhan, Rajeesh (GE Healthcare) <Rajeesh.Padmanabhan@ge.com> [20070211 15:40:27 +0530]:
Hi All,
I need to convert syslog-ng logs into xml format. Could you please help me to do the same. If someone can send me a sample format, would be great.
Oh dear...sounds like someone caught 'xml fever', it happens to all of us at some stage and we usually recover from the illness when its too late and the project is already using it...
XML is something thats abused more often than its used properly. Its useful if you have two rather different systems that have no common data exchange mechanism between them and so XML is used as a 'common' format. Bear in mind that this means is at both ends you have to get programming tech-monkeys to write scripts to convert the data to XML and then back from XML into another format. In situations like this you do not care that it could take two weeks of solid CPU crunching to import the data, just as long as it gets there...
Now as you have not given much detail about why you need the files in an XML format or what you plan on doing with the files the follow format is probably 'suitable':
<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?> <syslog> <message>first syslog message</message> <message>second syslog message</message> ... </syslog>
I'm finding it hard to think of a situation where XML and syslog data would be a good idea given that its rather easy to parse and store syslog data already. People want to archive and easily search (usually with nothing more than grep) their syslog logs and in an XML format searching your logs *will* slow down by at least a factor of 1000.
A far more suitable format, if flat text files is not good enough, is a SQL database; probably the only real useful application of an SQL database[1].
I'm unsure how to help you recover from your XML fever, it was difficult for me to grow out of. I learn from my mistakes and unfortunately for me when you base a project around XML the mistakes (for me at least) do not have an effect till much later on. There is nothing on the Internet as suggested reading but I am happy to discuss this off list if you want to.
I did some digging around to try to see if there was anything commercial doing this and found[2] something and was shocked at how they were doing it...its a bad schema and seems to be a solution to something that is not actually a problem.
*Everything* that deals with logging data should support syslog built logfiles (you might need to use syslog-ng with its template() command to structure the logfile to be in a format that the import engine expects though), if it does not you should look for some other software. My gut feelings tell me this is an internal homebrew project though..
I hope the 'fever' breaks soon :)
Cheers
Alex
[1] thats another rant of mine though :) [2] http://www.kiwisyslog.com/kb/idx/4/125/article/
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