[syslog-ng] How to convert syslog-ng logs into xml format

[Padmanabhan, Rajeesh (GE Healthcare)]

 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 at lists.balabit.hu
[mailto:syslog-ng-bounces at 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 at 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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