Collecting Syslogs

With SigNoz you can collect your syslogs logs and perform different queries on top of it. In this blog we will configure rsyslog to forward our system logs to tcp endpoint of otel-collector and use syslog receiver in otel-collector to receive and parse the logs. Below are the steps to collect syslogs.

Steps

Modify the docker-compose.yaml file present inside deploy/docker/clickhouse-setup to expose a port, in this case 54527 so that we can forward syslogs to this port.

...
otel-collector:
    image: signoz/signoz-otel-collector:0.55.0-rc.3
    command: ["--config=/etc/otel-collector-config.yaml"]
    volumes:
      - ./otel-collector-config.yaml:/etc/otel-collector-config.yaml
    ports:
      - "54527:54527"
...

Add the syslog reciever to otel-collector-config.yaml which is present inside deploy/docker/clickhouse-setup
```
receivers:
  syslog:
    tcp:
      listen_address: "0.0.0.0:54527"
    protocol: rfc3164
    location: UTC
    operators:
      - type: move
        from: attributes.message
        to: body
...
```
Here we are collecting the logs and moving message from attributes to body using operators that are available. You can read more about operators here
For more configurations that are available for syslog receiver please check here.

Next we will modify our pipeline inside otel-collector-config.yaml to include the receiver we have created above.

service:
    ....
    logs:
        receivers: [otlp, syslog]
        processors: [batch]
        exporters: [clickhouselogsexporter]

Now we can restart the otel collector container so that new changes are applied and we can forward our logs to port 54527.
Modify your rsyslog.conf file present inside /etc/ by running sudo vim /etc/rsyslog.conf and adding the this line at the end
```
*.* action(type="omfwd" target="0.0.0.0" port="54527" protocol="tcp")
```
For production use cases it is recommended to using something like
```
*.*  action(type="omfwd" target="0.0.0.0" port="54527" protocol="tcp"
        action.resumeRetryCount="10"
        queue.type="linkedList" queue.size="10000")
```
So that you have retires and queue in place to de-couple the sending from the other logging action.
The value of target might vary depending on where SigNoz is deployed, since it is deployed on the same host I am using 0.0.0.0 for more help you can visit here
Now restart your rsyslog service by running sudo systemctl restart rsyslog.service
You can check the status of service by running sudo systemctl status rsyslog.service
If there are no errors your logs will be visible on SigNoz UI.

Steps​

Steps