[syslog-ng] Using source tags in rewrites?

[Steve Barnes]

> To what end?
> Rewrites are used to change or set key/value pairs. Flags arent key/value
> pairs, theyre flags, meaning you either have the flag, or you dont. Think
> of it this way; each incoming log statment has a list of flag names
> associated with it, you can see if a certain flag name is in that list,
> but thats it.
> It would help to know what youre trying to accomplish though.
> -Patrick

Patrick

I have ~70 different log files containing the results of a daily
processing cycle. None of these log files are Syslog formatted. Unlike an
Apache log file entry, each line of these log files is ambiguous - unless
you referred to a portion of the file name, you'd have no way to
differentiate a line from one file with another line from another file.

The plan is to have SyslogNG set up as a client on a machine, tracking the
contents of these files as they are updated. Interesting lines are
filtered on the client with matching lines pushed across the network to a
SyslogNG server. The server is responsible for processing lines against a
pattern DB and then stuffing the useful information into a PostgreSQL
backend.

What I was hoping to do on the client side is tag each source in
syslog-ng.conf with a meaningful name and then include that tag in either
the IETF structured data or, by using a rewrite, prefix each log line
before transmission with the tag value. This would give the SyslogNG
server at the other end someway to differentiate messages as they arrived.

Further reading yesterday uncovered the following in the 3.2 PE
documentation:

http://www.balabit.com/dl/html/syslog-ng-pe-v3.2-guide-admin-en.html/tagging_messages.html

"To include the tags in the message, use the $TAGS macro in a template.
Alternatively, if you are using the IETF-syslog message format, you can
include the $TAGS macro in the .SDATA.meta part of the message. Note that
the $TAGS macro is available only in syslog-ng PE 3.1.1 and later."

So it looks like I've found the answer to my question? Before I start
along the path seeking purchase approval for SyslogNG PE, I wanted to make
sure there was no other way to do what I hand in mind?

Cheers

Steve