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<h1>Writing syslog messages to MySQL</h1>
<p><small><i>Written by <a href="http://www.adiscon.com/en/people/rainer-gerhards.php">Rainer
Gerhards</a> (2008-02-28)</i></small></p>
<h2>Abstract</h2>
<p><i><b>In this paper, I describe how to write
<a href="http://www.monitorware.com/en/topics/syslog/">syslog</a>
messages to a <a href="http://www.mysql.com">MySQL</a>
database.</b> Having syslog messages in a database is often
handy, especially when you intend to set up a front-end for viewing
them. This paper describes an approach with <a href="http://www.rsyslog.com/">rsyslogd</a>,
an
alternative enhanced syslog daemon natively supporting MySQL. I
describe the components needed to be installed and how to configure
them. Please note that as of this writing, rsyslog supports a variety
of databases. While this guide is still MySQL-focussed, you
can probably use it together with other ones too. You just need to
modify a few settings.</i></p>
<h2>Background</h2>
<p>In many cases, syslog data is simply written to text files.
This approach has some advantages, most notably it is very fast and
efficient. However, data stored in text files is not readily accessible
for real-time viewing and analysis. To do that, the messages need to be
in a database. There are various ways to store syslog messages in a
database. For example, some have the syslogd write text files which are
later feed via a separate script into the database. Others have written
scripts taking the data (via a pipe) from a non-database-aware syslogd
and store them as they appear. Some others use database-aware syslogds
and make them write the data directly to the database. In this paper, I
use that "direct write" approach. I think it is superior, because the
syslogd itself knows the status of the database connection and thus can
handle it intelligently (well ... hopefully ;)). I use rsyslogd to
acomplish this, simply because I have initiated the rsyslog project
with database-awareness as one goal.</p>
<p><b>One word of caution:</b> while message storage
in the database provides an excellent foundation for interactive
analysis, it comes at a cost. Database i/o is considerably slower than
text file i/o. As such, directly writing to the database makes sense
only if your message volume is low enough to allow a) the syslogd, b)
the network, and c) the database server to catch up with it. Some time
ago, I have written a paper on
<a href="http://www.monitorware.com/Common/en/Articles/performance-optimizing-syslog-server.php">optimizing
syslog server performance</a>. While this paper talks about
Window-based solutions, the ideas in it are generic enough to apply
here, too. So it might be worth reading if you anticipate medium high
to high traffic. If you anticipate really high traffic (or very large
traffic spikes), you should seriously consider forgetting about direct
database writes - in my opinion, such a situation needs either a very
specialised system or a different approach (the text-file-to-database
approach might work better for you in this case).
</p>
<h2>Overall System Setup</h2>
<p>In this paper, I concentrate on the server side. If you are
thinking about interactive syslog message review, you probably want to
centralize syslog. In such a scenario, you have multiple machines (the
so-called clients) send their data to a central machine (called server
in this context). While I expect such a setup to be typical when you
are interested in storing messages in the database, I do not describe
how to set it up. This is beyond the scope of this paper. If you search
a little, you will probably find many good descriptions on how to
centralize syslog. If you do that, it might be a good idea to do it
securely, so you might also be interested in my paper on <a href="rsyslog_stunnel.html">
ssl-encrypting syslog message transfer</a>.</p>
<p>No matter how the messages arrive at the server, their
processing is always the same. So you can use this paper in combination
with any description for centralized syslog reporting.</p>
<p>As I already said, I use rsyslogd on the server. It has
intrinsic support for talking to MySQL databases. For obvious reasons,
we also need an instance of MySQL running. To keep us focussed, the
setup of MySQL itself is also beyond the scope of this paper. I assume
that you have successfully installed MySQL and also have a front-end at
hand to work with it (for example,
<a href="http://www.phpmyadmin.net/">phpMyAdmin</a>).
Please make sure that this is installed, actually working and you have
a basic understanding of how to handle it.</p>
<h2>Setting up the system</h2>
<p>You need to download and install rsyslogd first. Obtain it
from the
<a href="http://www.rsyslog.com/">rsyslog site</a>.
Make sure that you disable stock syslogd, otherwise you will experience
some difficulties. On some distributions (Fedora 8 and above, for
example), rsyslog may already by the default syslogd, in which case you
obviously do not need to do anything specific. For many others, there
are prebuild packages available. If you use either, please make sure
that you have the required database plugins for your database
available. It usually is a separate package and typically <span style="font-weight: bold;">not</span> installed by default.</p>
<p>It is important to understand how rsyslogd talks to the
database. In rsyslogd, there is the concept of "templates". Basically,
a template is a string that includes some replacement characters, which
are called "properties" in rsyslog. Properties are accessed via the "<a href="property_replacer.html">Property Replacer</a>".
Simply said, you access properties by including their name between
percent signs inside the template. For example, if the syslog message
is "Test", the template "%msg%" would be expanded to "Test". Rsyslogd
supports sending template text as a SQL statement to MySQL. As such,
the template must be a valid SQL statement. There is no limit in what
the statement might be, but there are some obvious and not so obvious
choices. For example, a template "drop table xxx" is possible, but does
not make an awful lot of sense. In practice, you will always use an
"insert" statment inside the template.</p>
<p>An example: if you would just like to store the msg part of
the full syslog message, you have probably created a table "syslog"
with a single column "message". In such a case, a good template would
be "insert into syslog(message) values ('%msg%')". With the example
above, that would be expanded to "insert into syslog(message)
values('Test')". This expanded string is then sent to the database.
It's that easy, no special magic. The only thing you must ensure is
that your template expands to a proper SQL statement and that this
statement matches your database design.</p>
<p>Does that mean you need to create database schema yourself and
also must fully understand rsyslogd's properties? No, that's not
needed. Because we anticipated that folks are probably more interested
in getting things going instead of designing them from scratch. So we
have provided a default schema as well as build-in support for it. This
schema also offers an additional benefit: rsyslog is part of <a href="http://www.adiscon.com/en/">Adiscon</a>'s
<a href="http://www.monitorware.com/en/">MonitorWare
product line</a> (which includes open source and closed source
members). All of these tools share the same default schema and know how
to operate on it. For this reason, the default schema is also called
the "MonitorWare Schema". If you use it, you can simply add <a href="http://www.phplogcon.org/">phpLogCon, a GPLed syslog
web interface</a>, to your system and have instant interactive
access to your database. So there are some benefits in using the
provided schema.</p>
<p>The schema definition is contained in the file "createDB.sql".
It comes with the rsyslog package. Review it to check that the database
name is acceptable for you. Be sure to leave the table and field names
unmodified, because otherwise you need to customize rsyslogd's default
sql template, which we do not do in this paper. Then, run the script
with your favourite MySQL tool. Double-check that the table was
successfully created.</p>
<p>MySQL support in rsyslog is integrated via a loadable plug-in
module. To use the database
functionality, MySQL must be enabled in the config file BEFORE the
first database table action is
used. This is done by placing the</p>
<blockquote>
<p><code>$ModLoad ommysql</code></p>
</blockquote>
<p>directive at the begining of /etc/rsyslog.conf. For other databases, use their plugin name (e.g. ompgsql).</p>
<p>Next, we need to tell rsyslogd to write data to the database.
As we use the default schema, we do NOT need to define a template for
this. We can use the hardcoded one (rsyslogd handles the proper
template linking). So all we need to do is add a simple selector line
to /etc/rsyslog.conf:</p>
<blockquote>
<p><code>*.* :ommysql:database-server,database-name,database-userid,database-password</code></p>
</blockquote>
<p>Again, other databases have other selector names, e.g. ":ompgsql:"
instead of ":ommysql:". See the output plugin's documentation for
details.</p><p>In many cases, MySQL will run on the local machine. In this
case, you can simply use "127.0.0.1" for <i>database-server</i>.
This can be especially advisable, if you do not need to expose MySQL to
any process outside of the local machine. In this case, you can simply
bind it to 127.0.0.1, which provides a quite secure setup. Of course,
also supports remote MySQL instances. In that case, use the remote
server name (e.g. mysql.example.com) or IP-address. The <i>
database-name</i> by default is "syslog". If you have modified
the default, use your name here. <i>Database-userid</i>
and <i>-password</i> are the credentials used to connect
to the database. As they are stored in clear text in rsyslog.conf, that
user should have only the least possible privileges. It is sufficient
to grant it INSERT privileges to the systemevents table, only. As a
side note, it is strongly advisable to make the rsyslog.conf file
readable by root only - if you make it world-readable, everybody could
obtain the password (and eventually other vital information from it).
In our example, let's assume you have created a MySQL user named
"syslogwriter" with a password of "topsecret" (just to say it bluntly:
such a password is NOT a good idea...). If your MySQL database is on
the local machine, your rsyslog.conf line might look like in this
sample:</p>
<blockquote>
<p><code>*.* :ommysql:127.0.0.1,Syslog,syslogwriter,topsecret</code></p>
</blockquote>
<p>Save rsyslog.conf, restart rsyslogd - and you should see
syslog messages being stored in the "systemevents" table!</p>
<p>The example line stores every message to the database.
Especially if you have a high traffic volume, you will probably limit
the amount of messages being logged. This is easy to acomplish: the
"write database" action is just a regular selector line. As such, you
can apply normal selector-line filtering. If, for example, you are only
interested in messages from the mail subsystem, you can use the
following selector line:</p>
<blockquote>
<p><code>mail.* </code><code>:ommysql:</code><code>127.0.0.1,syslog,syslogwriter,topsecret</code></p>
</blockquote>
<p>Review the <a href="rsyslog_conf.html">rsyslog.conf</a>
documentation for details on selector lines and their filtering.</p>
<p><b>You have now completed everything necessary to store
syslog messages to the MySQL database.</b> If you would like to
try out a front-end, you might want to look at <a href="http://www.phplogcon.org/">phpLogCon</a>, which
displays syslog data in a browser. As of this writing, phpLogCon is not
yet a powerful tool, but it's open source, so it might be a starting
point for your own solution.</p>
<h2>On Reliability...</h2>
<p>Rsyslogd writes syslog messages directly to the database. This
implies that the database must be available at the time of message
arrival. If the database is offline, no space is left or something else
goes wrong - rsyslogd can not write the database record. If rsyslogd is
unable to store a message, it performs one retry. This is helpful if
the database server was restarted. In this case, the previous
connection was broken but a reconnect immediately succeeds. However, if
the database is down for an extended period of time, an immediate retry
does not help.</p>
<p>Message loss in this scenario can easily be prevented with
rsyslog. All you need to do is run the database writer in queued mode.
This is now described in a generic way and I do not intend to duplicate
it here. So please be sure to read "<a href="rsyslog_high_database_rate.html">Handling a massive
syslog database insert rate with Rsyslog</a>", which describes
the scenario and also includes configuration examples.</p>
<h2>Conclusion</h2>
<p>With minimal effort, you can use rsyslogd to write syslog
messages to a MySQL database. You can even make it absolutely fail-safe
and protect it against database server downtime. Once the messages are
arrived there, you
can interactivley review and analyse them. In practice, the messages
are also stored in text files for longer-term archival and the
databases are cleared out after some time (to avoid becoming too slow).
If you expect an extremely high syslog message volume, storing it in
real-time to the database may outperform your database server. In such
cases, either filter out some messages or used queued mode (which in
general is recommended with databases).</p>
<p>The method outlined in this paper provides an easy to setup
and maintain solution for most use cases.</p>
<h3>Feedback Requested</h3>
<p>I would appreciate feedback on this paper. If you have
additional ideas, comments or find bugs, please
<a href="mailto:rgerhards@adiscon.com">let me know</a>.</p>
<h2>References and Additional Material</h2>
<ul>
<li><a href="http://www.rsyslog.com">www.rsyslog.com</a>
- the rsyslog site</li>
<li> <a href="http://www.monitorware.com/Common/en/Articles/performance-optimizing-syslog-server.php">
Paper on Syslog Server Optimization</a></li>
</ul>
<h2>Revision History</h2>
<ul>
<li>2005-08-02 * <a href="http://www.adiscon.com/en/people/rainer-gerhards.php">Rainer
Gerhards</a> * initial version created</li>
<li>2005-08-03 * <a href="http://www.adiscon.com/en/people/rainer-gerhards.php">Rainer
Gerhards</a> * added references to demo site</li>
<li>2007-06-13 * <a href="http://www.adiscon.com/en/people/rainer-gerhards.php">Rainer
Gerhards</a> * removed demo site - was torn down because too
expensive for usage count</li>
<li>2008-02-21 * <a href="http://www.adiscon.com/en/people/rainer-gerhards.php">Rainer
Gerhards</a> * updated reliability section, can now be done with
on-demand disk queues</li><li>2008-02-28 * <a href="http://www.adiscon.com/en/people/rainer-gerhards.php">Rainer
Gerhards</a> * added info on other databases, updated syntax to more recent one</li>
</ul>
<h2>Copyright</h2>
<p>Copyright (c) 2005-2008
<a href="http://www.adiscon.com/en/people/rainer-gerhards.php">Rainer
Gerhards</a> and <a href="http://www.adiscon.com/en/">Adiscon</a>.</p>
<p>Permission is granted to copy, distribute and/or modify this
document under the terms of the GNU Free Documentation License, Version
1.2 or any later version published by the Free Software Foundation;
with no Invariant Sections, no Front-Cover Texts, and no Back-Cover
Texts. A copy of the license can be viewed at <a href="http://www.gnu.org/copyleft/fdl.html">
http://www.gnu.org/copyleft/fdl.html</a>.</p>
<p>[<a href="manual.html">manual index</a>]
[<a href="rsyslog_conf.html">rsyslog.conf</a>]
[<a href="http://www.rsyslog.com/">rsyslog site</a>]</p>
<p><font size="2">This documentation is part of the
<a href="http://www.rsyslog.com/">rsyslog</a> project.<br>
Copyright © 2008 by <a href="http://www.gerhards.net/rainer">Rainer Gerhards</a> and
<a href="http://www.adiscon.com/">Adiscon</a>. Released under the GNU GPL
version 2 or higher.</font></p>
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