syslog-ng For Linux

syslog-ng is an open source, free and enhanced version of the syslogd project that started ten years ago for Linux and UNIX-like operating systems. The application can operate in server or agent mode, and supports the reliable TCP (Transmission Control Protocol) protocol.

The project provides users with a command-line software that can be successfully used as a viable log management solution to create, collect, classify, filter, forward, as well as to store log messages.

Key features include high performance, trusted transfer, increased reliability, message filtering and sorting, event tagging and correlation, support for the latest IETF standards, and a big user community.

With the syslog-ng software, skilled system administrators will be able to successfully build a flexible and reliable logging infrastructure even in heterogeneous environments, without to much hassle and in as shortest time as possible.

The program features a wide variety of command-line options, among which we can mention the ability to set the list of colon separate folders that will be used to search for modules, view module information, set the filename of the configuration file and the persistent configuration file, write the preprocessed configuration file to a specific file, parse and read the configuration file, set the control socket, as well as to set the number of I/O worker threads.

The program is written entirely in the C programming language and it’s distributed as a universal sources archive (tarball). To install it on your GNU/Linux system, first search for a pre-build binary package on the default software repositories of your distribution.

If the software is not available on your distro, download the latest tar archive from Softpedia, save it on your computer, unpack it, open a Linux Terminal and navigate to the location of the extracted archive file with the ‘cd’ command.

Then, execute the ‘./configure && make’ command to optimize and compile the program for your hardware architecture/operating system, followed by the ‘make install’ command as root or with sudo to install system wide and make it available to all users.