In the paper introducing journald/Linux Journal a number of shortcommings in current syslog practice are mentioned. The authors say:
Syslog has been around for ~30 years, due to its simplicity and ubiquitousness it is an invaluable tool for administrators. However, the number of limitations are substantial, and over time they have started to be serious problems:
I have now taken some time to look at each of these claims in depth. But before I start, I need to tell that I am working in the IT logging field for nearly 15 years, have participated in a number of standards efforts and written a lot of syslog-related software with rsyslog being a prime example (some commercial tools I have been involved with can be found here). So probably I have a bias and my words need to be taken with a grain of salt. On the other hand, the journald authors also have a bias, so I guess that’s a fair exchange of arguments ;).
In my analysis, I compare the journald effort with what rsyslog currently provides and leave closed source software out. It is also important to note that there is a difference between syslog, the protocol, a specific syslog application (like rsyslog) and a system log message store. Due to tradition, these terms are often used for different things and one must deduce from context, what is meant. The paper applies the same sloppiness in regard to terms. I use best effort to extract the proper meaning. I quote the arguments as they originally appeared inside the paper. However, I rearrange them a bit in order to put related things closer together. I retain the original numbering so that you can compare to the original paper. I also tried to be similar brief with my arguments. Now proof-reading the post, I see that I failed with that. Sorry, but that’s as brief as I can provide serious counterargument. I broadly try to classify arguments in various levels of “True” vs “Wrong”, so you may take this as an ultra-short reply.
So let’s start with Arguments related to the log storage system. In general, the paper is right that there is no real log storage system (like, for example, the Windows Event Log). Keeping logs only in sequential text files definitely has disadvantages. Syslog implementations like rsyslog or syslog-ng have somewhat addressed this by providing the ability to use databases as storage backends (the commercial syslog-ng fork also has a proprietary log store). This has some drawbacks as well. The paper proposes a new proprietary indexed syslog message store. I kind of like this idea, have even considered to write something like this as an optional component for rsyslog (but had no time yet to actually work on it). I am not convinced, though, that all systems necessarily need such a syslog storage subsystem.
With that said, now let’s look at the individual arguments:
5. Reading log files is simple but very inefficient. Many key log operations have a complexity of O(n). Indexing is generally not available.
True. It just needs to be said that many tools inside the tool chain only need sequential access. But those that need random access have to pay a big price. Please note, however, that it is often only necessary to “tail” log files, that is act on the latest log entries. This can be done rather quickly even with text files. I know both the problems and the capabilities, because Adiscon LogAnalyzer, in which I am involved, is a web-based analysis and reporting tool capable of working on log files. Paging is simple, but searching is slow with large files (we recommend databases if that is often required). Now that I write that, a funny fact is that one of the more important reasons for creating rsyslog was that we were unhappy with flat text files (see rsyslog history doc). And so I created a syslogd capable of writing to databases. Things seem to be a bit cyclic, though with a different spin ;)
8. Access control is non-existent. Unless manually scripted by the administrator a user either gets full access to the log files, or no access at all.
Mostly True and hard to make any argument against this (except, of course, if you consider database back ends as log stores, but that’s not the typical case).
10. Automatic rotation of log files is available, but less than ideal in most implementations: instead of watching disk usage continuously to enforce disk usage limits rotation is only attempted in fixed time intervals, thus leaving the door open to many DoS attacks.
Partly True, at least in regard to current practice. Rsyslog, for example, can limit file sizes as they are written (“outchannel action”), but this feature is seldomly used and due to be replaced by a better one. The better one is partly implemented but received no priority because nobody in the community flagged this as an urgent requirement. As a side-note: Envision that journald intends to shrink the log and/or place stricter restrictions on rate-limiting when disk space begins to run low. If I were an attacker, I would simply begin to fill the disk then, and make journald swipe out the log store for me.
11. Rate limiting is available in some implementations, however, generally does not take the disk usage or service assignment into account, which is highly advisable.
It needs to be said what “rate limiting” means. I guess it means preventing an application from spamming the logs with frequently repeated messages. This feature is available in rsyslog. It is right that disk usage is not taken into account (see comment above on implications). I don’t know what “service assignment” means in this context, so I don’t comment on that one. Rate limiting is more than run-away or spamming processes. It is a very complex issue. Rsyslog has output rate limiting as well, and much more is thinkable. But correct, current rate limiting looks at a number of factors but not the disk assignment. On the other hand, does that make sense, if e.g. a message is not even destined to go to the disk?
12. Compression in the log structure on disk is generally available but usually only as effect of rotation and has a negative effect on the already bad complexity behaviour of many key log operations.
Partly True. Rsyslog supports writing in zip format for at least one and a half year (I am too lazy to check the ChangeLog). This provides huge savings for those that turn on the feature. Without doubt, logs compressed in this way are much harder to process in real-time.
7. Log files are easily manipulable by attackers, providing easy ways to hide attack information from the administrator
Misleadingly True. If thinking of a local machine, only, this is true. However, all security best practices tell that it is far from a good idea to save logs on a machine that is publicly accessible. This is the reason that log messages are usually immediately sent do some back end system. It is right that this can not happen in some setup, especially very small ones.
My conclusion on the log store: there definitely is room for improvement. But why not improve it within the existing frameworks? Among others, this would have the advantage that existing methods could be used to decide what needs to be stored inside the log store. Usually, log contain noise events that administrators do not want to log at all, because of the overhead associated with them. The exists best practices for the existing tool chain on how to handle that.
Now on to the other detail topics:
1. The message data is generally not authenticated, every local process can claim to be Apache under PID 4711, and syslog will believe that and store it on disk.
9. The meta data stored for log entries is limited, and lacking key bits of information, such as service name, audit session or monotonic timestamps.
Mostly wrong. IMHO, both make up a single argument. At the suggestion of Lennart Poettering, rsyslog can force the pid inside the TAG to match the pid of the log message emitter – for quite a while now. It is also easy to add additional “trusted properties”. I made an experimental implementation in rsyslog yesterday. It took a couple of hours and the code is available as part of rsyslog 5.9.4. As a side-note, the level of “trust” one wants to have in such properties needs to be defined – for truly trusted trusted properties some serious cryptography is needed (this is not specified in the journald proposal nor currently implemented in rsyslog).
2. The data logged is very free-form. Automated log-analyzers need to parse human language strings to a) identify message types, and b) parse parameters from them. This results in regex horrors, and a steady need to play catch-up with upstream developers who might tweak the human language log strings in new versions of their software. Effectively, in a away, in order not to break user-applied regular expressions all log messages become ABI of the software generating them, which is usually not intended by the developer.
Trivial (I can’t commit myself to a “True” or “Wrong” on such a trivial finding). Finally, the authors have managed to describe the log analysis problem as we currently face it. This is not at all a syslog problem, it is problem of development discipline. For one, syslog has “solved” this issue with RFC5424 structured data. Use it and be happy (but, granted, the syslog() API currently is a bit problematic). The real problem is the missing discipline. Take, for example, the Windows Event Log. The journald proposal borrows heavily on its concepts. In Windows Event Log, there is a developer-assigned unique ID within the application’s reserved namespace available. The combination of both app namespace (also automatically created) and ID together does exactly the same thing as the proposed UUID. In Windows Event Log, there are also “structured fields” available, but in the form of an array (this is a bit different from name-value pairs but far from totally different). This system has been in place since the earliest versions of Windows NT, more than 15 years ago. So it would be a decent assumption that the problem described as a syslog problem does not exist in the Windows world, right (especially given the fact that Windows purposefully does not support syslog)? Well, have a look at the problems related to Windows log analysis: these are exactly the same! I could also offer a myriad of other samples, like WELF, Apache Log Format, … The bottom line is that developer discipline is not easy to achieve. And, among others, a taxonomy is actually needed to extract semantic meaning from the logged event. It probably is educating to read the FAQ for CEE, a standard currently in development that tries to somewhat solve the logging mess (wait a moment: before saying that CEE is a bunch of clueless morons, please have a look at the CEE Board Members first).
3. The timestamps generally do not carry timezone information, even though some newer specifications define support for it.
Partly Wrong. High-Precision timestamps are available for many years and default in rsyslog. Unfortunately, many distros have turned them off, because they break existing tools. So in current practice this is a problem, but it could be solved by deleting one line in rsyslog.conf. And remember that if that causes trouble to some “vital” tool, journald will break that tool even more. Note that some distros, like Gentoo, already have enabled high precision timestamps.
4. Syslog is only one of many log systems on local machines. Separate logs are kept for utmp/wtmp, lastlog, audit, kernel logs, firmware logs, and a multitude of application-specific log formats. This is not only unnecessarily complex, but also hides the relation between the log entries in the various subsystems.
Rhetorically True – but what why is that the failure of syslog? In fact, this problem would not exist if developers had consistently used syslog. So the problem is not rooted in syslog but rather in the fact that syslog is not being used. Lesson learned: even if standards exist, many developers simply ignore them (this is also an interesting argument in regard to problem number #2, think about it…).
13. Classic Syslog traditionally is not useful to handle early boot or late shutdown logging, even though recent improvements (for example in systemd) made this work.
True – including that fact that systemd already solved that problem.
14. Binary data cannot be logged, which in some cases is essential (Examples: ATA SMART blobs or SCSI sense data, firmware dumps).
Wrong, the short answer is: it can be logged, but must be properly encoded. In the IETF syslog working group we even increased the max message sizes for this reason (actually, there is no hard limit anymore).
The longer, and more correct, answer is that this is a long-standing discussion inside the logging world. Using that view, it is hard to say if the claim is true or false; it often even is argued like being a religion. Fact is that the current logging toolset does not work well for binary data (even encoded). This is even the case for the Windows Event Log, which supports binary data. In my view, I think most logging experts lean towards the side that binary data should be avoided and, if unavoidable, must be encoded in a text-friendly way. A core problem with the usefulness of binary data is that it often is hard to decode, and even more to understand, on the non-native platform (remember that the system used during analysis is often not the system where the event was initially recorded).
6. The syslog network protocol is very simple, but also very limited. Since it generally supports only a push transfer model, and does not employ store-and-forward, problems such as Thundering Herd or packet loss severely hamper its use.
Wrong, missing all improvement made in the past ten years. There is a new RFC series which supports TLS-secured reliable transmission of syslog messages and which permits to place fine-grain access control on who can talk with whom inside a relay chain. UDP syslog is still available and is so for good reason. I cannot dig into the details here, part of that reasoning is on the same grounds why we use audio more often over UDP than TCP. Using UDP syslog is strictly optional and there are few scenarios where it is actually needed. And, if so, the “problem” mentioned is actually a “solution” to a much more serious problem not even mentioned in the journald paper. For a glimpse at these problems, have a lock at my blog post on the “reliability problem”. Also, store-and-foward is generally available in rsyslog via action queues, failover handling and a lot of other things. I admit that setting up a complex logging system, sometimes requires an expert. On the “loss issue”, one may claim that I myself say that plain TCP syslog is not totally lossless. That claim is right, but the potential loss Window is relatively small. Also, one can use different protocols that solve the issue. In rsyslog, I introduced proprietary RELP for that very reason. There is also completely lossless RFC3195, which is a great protocol (but without future). It is supported by rsyslog, but only extremely few other projects implement it. The IETF (including me) assumes that RFC3195 is a failure – not from technical fact but in the sense that it was too far away from the usual logging practice to be picked up by enough folks. [Just to avoid mis-intepretation: contrary to RFC3195, RELP is well alive, well-accepted and in widespread use. It is only RFC3195 that is a failure.]
Concluding my remarks, I do not see anything so broken in syslog that it can only be fixed by a total replacement of technology. Right contrary, there is a rich tool set and expertise available. Existing solutions, especially in the open source world, are quite modular and can easily be extended. It is not even necessary to extend existing projects. A new log store, for example, could also be implemented by a new tool that imports a decent log format from stdin to a back end data store. That would be easily usable not only from rsyslog but from any other tool that is part of the current log tool chain. For example, it may immediately consume Apache or other application logs (of course, such a tool would require proper cryptography to be used for cryptographic tasks…). There is also need for a new logging API – the catch-all syslog() call is clearly insufficient (an interesting detail fact is that journald promises to retain syslog() as a first-class logging interface — that means journald can solve none of the issues associated with that API, especially in regard to claim #2).
So extending existing applications, or writing new ones that tightly integrate into the existing toolset is the right thing to do. One can view journald as such an extension. However, this extension is somewhat problematic as its design document tells that it intends to replace the whole logging system. Especially disturbing is that the reasoning, as outlined above, essentially boils down to a new log store and various well-known mostly political problems (with development discipline for structured formats right at the top of them). Finally, the proposal claims to provide more security, but fails to achieve at least the level that RFC5848 syslog is able to provide. Granted, rsyslog, for example, does not (yet) implement RFC5848. But why intends journald to implement some home-grown pseudo security system when a standard-based method designed by real crypto experts is available? I guess the same question can be applied to the reasoning for the journald project at large.
Let me conclude this posting with the same quote I started with:
Syslog has been around for ~30 years, due to its simplicity and ubiquitousness it is an invaluable tool for administrators. However, the number of limitations are substantial, and over time they have started to be serious problems:
Mostly Wrong. But it is true that syslog is an invaluable tool,especially in heterogeneous environments.
