Tech Enthusiast. Nature Lover. Computer Geek. rsyslog lead developer.
For a concise Computer Science summary of this effort, see the section at the end of this article.
When I began the current documentation overhaul, the objective was never limited to cleaning up a few pages. From the beginning, the plan was to prepare rsyslog for the AI era. And the truth is simple: without modern AI tooling, this work would not have been feasible at this depth or speed.
rsyslog’s configuration language has grown into a very capable scripting environment — RainerScript — that can express almost anything a log pipeline might need. For complex systems, that won’t change.
But many modern environments — especially containerized and cloud-native ones — expect configuration in YAML. So the idea is simple: rsyslog should understand that world directly.
I thought I provide a quick “happy camper” status update. Even though this was only a side-activity, I had an exceptionally good day working with Digital Ocean Gradient and open source models. I am working on support Agents for the rsyslog ecosystem.
Adiscon (rsyslog’s main sponsor) has joined connect.IT Heilbronn-Franken. Short version: I want more first-hand input from real deployments in AI, logging, and security. Local practitioners have plenty of it. Turning those lessons into clear guidance helps the global rsyslog community. Simple.
Continue reading “Adiscon joins connect.IT Heilbronn-Franken”A few days ago, we posted the short announcement on the project site:
👉 New rsyslog AI Assistant — powered by DigitalOcean Gradient
This is the longer story: the plan, the first results, and what we think is sensible to do next.
I recently had a discussion about data lakes. It made me realize that people often picture them as the starting point of data collection — as if all information somehow appears in the lake. In reality, no lake exists without rivers. And in the world of IT systems, rsyslog is part of that river system.
Windows logs provide a wealth of information that must be made usable for Observability. As you may know, I work on normalizing these logs for quite some while, I even created liblognorm for that purpose. Ingesting them properly is important for schema mapping, e.g. to Elastic Cloud.
Continue reading “Revisiting old style Windows Log Schema Mapping”I am glad to tell that I finally managed to solve an issue that caused confusion for years. Someone had cloned and published the rsyslog documentation at readthedocs. Unfortunately, it was not maintained afterwards and also looked like an official rsyslog doc. That added a lot to the “rsyslog’s doc is bad and inconsistent” feel inside the community. This could now be resolved, and current, official doc is now available at readthedocs. I am very happy and glad for readthedocs staff members who helped us to finally resolve the issue.
Time goes fast, it is Sep 10 already. Mid August I said we will do a great refactoring of omhttp within a week or two. Well, that did not work out as planned. We still made solid progress, but more pressing work put it on hold for a bit. Time for a small update of what is happening in rsyslog.
In the past days I noticed PR patterns that do not look right. This is a smell, not a verdict. The upside is real: rsyslog is interesting enough to attract attention. That is actually great news. Now we have the problem ourselves, and that is the moment to engineer the right guardrails without losing our welcoming tone. You need to be a target in order to gain sufficient experience to tackle that hard problem.
