3.6.0alpha3

This is the third alpha release of the upcoming syslog-ng OSE 3.6 branch. It is expected to be the last alpha release, with the first beta in about two weeks. This release contains a number of important features and bugfixes:

Changed defaults

• The flush-lines() setting now defaults to 100, rather than 1, for increased speed.

Features

• The system() source will now parse @cim marked messages as JSON, if the JSON module is available at run-time. This improves inter-operation with other software that uses the Common Information Model.

Features from the Incubator

• The $(or) template function that returns the first non-empty argument is now included in syslog-ng itself.
• The $(padding) template function, to pad text with custom padding to a given length is also included.
• The $(graphite-output) template function, to be used for sending metrics to Graphite was ported over from the Incubator. The graphite() destination SCL block is also available now, to make it even easier to talk to Graphite.
• The riemann() destination, which allows sending metrics to the Riemann monitoring system was also ported over from the Incubator.

Threaded destinations

A number of features were implemented for all threaded destinations: amqp(), mongodb(), redis(), riemann(), smtp() and stomp().

• The destinations gained support for SEQNUM persistence: the counter will be preserved across reloads and restarts.
• A new option called retries() was implemented for all of these, which controls how many times a message delivery is retried before dropping it.
• The throttle() option is now implemented, and works for all of the aforementioned destination drivers.
• The message delivery loop was optimised to do less sleep/wakeup cycles, which should make the drivers not only faster, but more CPU friendly too.

Bugfixes

• The basicfuncs module was fixed to work correctly on 32-bit architectures.
• The stored statistics is no longer incremented by various drivers when they mean processed.
• The type hinting feature is now more picky about what kind of type hints it accepts, allowing one to use template functions in - for example - $(format-json) pairs.

Miscellaneous changes

• We now ship a "Contributors Guide" in the CONTRIBUTING.md file.

Credits

syslog-ng is developed as a community project, and as such it relies on volunteers, to do the work necessary to produce syslog-ng.

Reporting bugs, testing changes, writing code or simply providing feedback are all important contributions, so please if you are a user of syslog-ng, contribute.

We would like to thank the following people for their contribution:

Andras Mitzki, Balazs Scheidler, Fabien Wernli, Gergely Nagy, Laszlo Budai, Peter Czanik, Robert Fekete, Tibor Benke, Viktor Juhasz, Viktor Tusa.