Introducing the rsyslog config builder tool

Wouldn’t it be great if we had an interactive tool that permitted it novices to build complex rsyslog configurations interactively? Without any need to understand the inner workings or even terminology? Indeed, that would not only be great, but in our opinion also remove a lot of pressure that we have on rsyslog’s documentation part.

In the light of this, we started to work on a tool called the rsyslog configuration builder“. An initial preview goes life right now today and we invite everyone to play with it. The initial version is hopefully already useful for many cases. However, the primary intent is to gather community feedback, reactions and further suggestions.

The initial version has a restricted set of supported inputs and outputs, as well as other constructs. It works with rsyslog v7.6 and above. The tool can be used anonymously and configurations are kept during the session, with the session timeout being a couple of hours. So that should be a fair amount of time to build your config. For the future, we plan to permit saving the config when logged in into the site. That way, you can work multiple days on a single configuration.

We have many more enhancements on our mind, but first of all we would like to get your feedback. You can provide feedback any way you like, but we would be extremely happy if you post either to the rsyslog mailing list or create an issue in the rsyslog website’s github project.

Moving rsyslog stable to v8…

I am happy to tell that I have finally finished the 8.2.0 rsyslog release and it is on its way to announcement, package build and so on. While v8 was basically finished since before last christmas, we had a couple of mostly nits holding the release. This is probably a lesson that we need to accept some nits instead of holding a release for so long.

With that said, there is still a nit: it is undecided how the new doc system shall be distributed. In 8.2.0, it will be a tarball inside the main tarball, something that already (and rightfully) drew some criticism. However, this time I have decided to keep on with the release rather than block it again. After all, it’s easy to fix this in 8.2.1 if we settle the issue quickly.

With v8 stable released, project policy is to officially stop support for v7. In any case, we’ll have a close look at 7.6 and will provide assistance in the next couple of weeks. After all, v8 is a considerable change, even some of the more exotic contributed output modules are not available with it. So there is a good point in keeping support for v7.6 at least until we really see there is no technical reason for keeping it.

I hope that v8 will be well-perceived … and look forward to hear both success and bug reports.

If you are interested in what are the big changes, please have a look at this slightly older blog post describing what’s new in the rsyslog v8 engine.