AxoSyslog: Open-source scalable security data processor
AxoSyslog is a syslog-ng fork, created and maintained by the original creator of syslog-ng, Balazs Scheidler, and his team.
“We first started by making syslog-ng more cloud-ready: we packaged syslog-ng in a container, added helm charts, and made it more suitable for use in cloud-native environments. We’ve also improved the monitoring and operational experience to help AxoSyslog better integrate with modern telemetry pipelines,” Balazs Scheidler, CEO of Axoflow, told Help Net Security.
AxoSyslog is not just about syslog data anymore. Supporting OpenTelemetry data, including metrics and traces, has made it a versatile tool for observability in telemetry pipelines.
“A unique AxoSyslog feature is the recently introduced FilterX: a consistent and comprehensive reimplementation of several core features (like syslog-ng filter statements, parsers, and rewrite rules) with improved performance, proper typing support, and the ability to handle multi-level typed objects. These come in handy when manipulating complex, deeply-nested data structures, like JSON, protocol buffers, or OpenTelemetry messages,” Scheidler added.
FilterX has a syntax and rich set of operators similar to popular scripting languages, allowing you to filter, parse, manipulate, and rewrite variables and complex data structures.
Future plans and download
“Our goal is to strengthen AxoSyslog as a generic purpose data and event processor that you can use in modern data processing environments. We have plans to extend FilterX with new parsers to make it even more versatile. Also, building on the AxoSyslog gRPC framework used in the Loki, BigQuery, ClickHouse, or OpenTelemetry drivers, we want to support more destinations, like Google Pub/Sub,” Scheidler concluded.
AxoSyslog is available for free download on GitHub. To start using AxoSyslog, you can use one of these deployment mechanisms:
- Containers (docker, podman)
- Helm charts (Kubernetes)
- Packages (deb, rpm, etc)
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