Sudo parser

The sudo parser can parse the log messages of the sudo command.

Prerequisites

  • AxoSyslog version 4.16 or later.

  • Install the axosyslog-scl package on Debian/Ubuntu. On RHEL and compatible distributions, the SCL files are part of the axosyslog base package.

    Your configuration must also contain @include "scl.conf", which the default configuration file already does. If the SCL files are missing, AxoSyslog fails to start with an unexpected LL_IDENTIFIER error.

    Terminal window
    @include "scl.conf"

    The sudo-parser() driver is a reusable configuration snippet (SCL). For details on using or writing such configuration snippets, see Reusing configuration blocks. You can find its source in scl/sudo/sudo.conf on GitHub.

Declaration:

Terminal window
   @version: 4.28
    @include "scl.conf"
    log {
        source { system(); };
        parser { sudo-parser(); };
        destination { ... };
    };

prefix()

Synopsis: prefix()

Description: Insert a prefix before the name part of the parsed name-value pairs to help further processing. For example:

  • To insert the my-parsed-data. prefix, use the prefix(my-parsed-data.) option.
  • To refer to a particular data that has a prefix, use the prefix in the name of the macro, for example, ${my-parsed-data.name}.
  • If you forward the parsed messages using the IETF-syslog protocol, you can insert all the parsed data into the SDATA part of the message using the prefix(.SDATA.my-parsed-data.) option.

Names starting with a dot (for example, .example) are reserved for use by AxoSyslog. If you use such a macro name as the name of a parsed value, it will attempt to replace the original value of the macro (note that only soft macros can be overwritten, see Hard versus soft macros for details). To avoid such problems, use a prefix when naming the parsed values, for example, prefix(my-parsed-data.)

By default, sudo-parser() uses the .sudo. prefix. To modify it, use the following format:

Terminal window
   parser { 
        sudo-parser(prefix("myprefix.")); 
    };
Last modified August 5, 2026: Small fixes and deduplications (99cac43a)