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Install AxoSyslog on RHEL/Fedora/AlmaLinux

You can install AxoSyslog 4.8 and newer on your RPM-based system from Axoflow’s RPM repository. AxoSyslog is a drop in replacement for the syslog-ng RPM package, all the AxoSyslog binaries and configuration files are stored at the same place on your system.

The following distributions are supported:

  • Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) 10 x86-64 / AlmaLinux 10 x86-64
  • Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) 9 x86-64 / AlmaLinux 9 x86-64
  • Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) 8 x86-64 / AlmaLinux 8 x86-64
  • Fedora 44 x86-64

(The packages for AlmaLinux probably work for Rocky Linux as well, but we haven’t tested it.)

Which package to install?

AxoSyslog supports many features, but you rarely need all of them on a single host. Sources and destinations that depend on external libraries live in separate modules, so you install only the ones you actually use. For example, the gRPC-based destinations (like loki() and opentelemetry()) come from the gRPC module, while HTTP-based destinations (like elasticsearch-http() and sumologic-http()) come from the HTTP module.

The Prerequisites section of every source, destination, and parser names the module it needs.

If a module isn’t installed, AxoSyslog doesn’t start, and reports a syntax error that points at the name of the driver you configured. For details, see Error: unexpected LL_IDENTIFIER.

The following table lists the AxoSyslog modules, the configuration objects each provides, and the package to install.

Module Provides Package
Base file(), network(), syslog(), tcp(), udp(), unix-stream(), unix-dgram(), pipe(), program(), stdin(), stdout(), usertty(), wildcard-file(), pseudofile(), system(), systemd-journal(), systemd-syslog(), internal(), csv-parser(), db-parser(), json-parser(), kv-parser(), linux-audit-parser(), date-parser(), regexp-parser(), tags-parser(), syslog-parser(), sdata-parser(), group-lines(), grouping-by(), app-parser(), metrics-probe(), disk-buffer(), rate-limit(), and most template functions axosyslog
Configuration Library (SCL) linux-audit(), default-network-drivers(), mbox(), nodejs(), osquery(), pacct(), snmptrap(), jellyfin(), pihole-ftl(), qbittorrent(), radarr() and the other *arr() sources, collectd(), graylog2(), loggly(), logmatic(), syslog-ng(), ewmm(), the application adapters (apache-accesslog-parser(), cisco-parser(), panos-parser(), sudo-parser(), and so on), and every HTTP-based destination Part of the axosyslog base package
gRPC opentelemetry(), axosyslog-otlp() (formerly syslog-ng-otlp()), loki(), bigquery(), clickhouse(), google-pubsub-grpc(), the otel_*() and protobuf_message() FilterX functions axosyslog-grpc
HTTP http() destination, ehttp(), elasticsearch-bulk(), and splunk-hec() sources, azure-auth-header(), and all SCL destinations built on HTTP: elasticsearch-http(), elasticsearch-datastream(), opensearch(), openobserve-log(), logscale(), splunk-hec-event(), splunk-hec-raw(), sumologic-http(), slack(), discord(), telegram(), azure-monitor(), google-pubsub() axosyslog-http
Python python() source, destination, parser and template function, python-fetcher(), python-http-header(), and the Python-based SCL drivers kubernetes(), kubernetes-metadata-parser(), s3(), webhook(), webhook-json(), hypr-app-audit-trail() axosyslog-python
Cloud authentication cloud-auth(), used by azure-monitor() and google-pubsub() axosyslog-cloud-auth
Kafka kafka-c() and the kafka() SCL destination axosyslog-kafka
MQTT mqtt() source and destination axosyslog-mqtt
AMQP amqp() axosyslog-amqp
MongoDB mongodb() axosyslog-mongodb
SQL sql() axosyslog-sql
Redis redis() axosyslog-redis
Riemann riemann() axosyslog-riemann
SMTP smtp() axosyslog-smtp
SNMP snmp(), snmptrapd-parser(), and the snmptrap() SCL source axosyslog-afsnmp
GeoIP2 geoip2() parser and the $(geoip2) template function axosyslog-geoip
Java java(). Only the HDFS Java module is shipped, the Java implementations of the Elasticsearch and HTTP destinations aren’t. axosyslog-java
HDFS hdfs() axosyslog-java
Secure logging $(slog) template function and the slog* command-line tools axosyslog-slog
eBPF ebpf() axosyslog-bpf
XML parser xml(), windows-eventlog-xml-parser(), and the parse_xml(), format_xml(), parse_windows_eventlog_xml(), format_windows_eventlog_xml() FilterX functions Part of the axosyslog base package
STOMP stomp() Part of the axosyslog base package
Graphite $(graphite-output) template function and the graphite() SCL destination Part of the axosyslog base package
add-contextual-data add-contextual-data() Part of the axosyslog base package
map-value-pairs map-value-pairs() Part of the axosyslog base package
getent $(getent) template function Part of the axosyslog base package
stardate $(stardate) template function Part of the axosyslog base package
Examples example-msg-generator(), example-random-generator(), random-choice-generator(), example-destination() Part of the axosyslog base package
Apache Arrow Flight arrow-flight() Not available

Note that the RPM package names differ from the Debian package names: they don’t have the mod- part, and some of them use a different name (for example, the GeoIP2 module is axosyslog-geoip, and the Kafka module is axosyslog-kafka).

AxoSyslog supports the sun-streams(), darwin-oslog(), darwin-oslog-stream(), and openbsd() drivers only on Solaris, macOS, and OpenBSD respectively. The Debian/Ubuntu and RHEL packages don’t include them.

Usually, you install the base package axosyslog-<version-number>.<distro>.x86_64.rpm, and the packages of specific modules that you want to use. We also provide debuginfo packages for every module, but you only need these in certain troubleshooting scenarios.

Steps

To install AxoSyslog on RedHat Enterprise Linux 9 or AlmaLinux 9, complete the following steps. The instructions for AlmaLinux probably work for Rocky Linux 9 as well, but we haven’t tested it.

  1. Run the following commands to enable the EPEL repositories for your distribution. This is needed to install some dependencies of AxoSyslog. (For RHEL 8 and compatible distributions, use these instructions.)

    • RHEL 9-10:

      sudo subscription-manager repos --enable codeready-builder-for-rhel-9-$(arch)-rpms
sudo dnf install https://dl.fedoraproject.org/pub/epel/epel-release-latest-9.noarch.rpm

    • AlmaLinux 9-10:

      sudo dnf install epel-release
sudo dnf config-manager --set-enabled crb

    • Fedora:

      sudo dnf install epel-release

  2. Add the AxoSyslog repository of your distribution:

    sudo tee /etc/yum.repos.d/axosyslog.repo <<< '[axosyslog]
name=AxoSyslog
baseurl=https://pkg.axoflow.io/rpm/stable/almalinux-9/$basearch
enabled=1
gpgcheck=1
repo_gpgcheck=1
gpgkey=https://pkg.axoflow.io/axoflow-code-signing-pub.asc' > /dev/null
    sudo tee /etc/yum.repos.d/axosyslog.repo <<< '[axosyslog]
name=AxoSyslog
baseurl=https://pkg.axoflow.io/rpm/stable/almalinux-8/$basearch
enabled=1
gpgcheck=1
repo_gpgcheck=1
gpgkey=https://pkg.axoflow.io/axoflow-code-signing-pub.asc' > /dev/null
    sudo tee /etc/yum.repos.d/axosyslog.repo <<< '[axosyslog]
name=AxoSyslog
baseurl=https://pkg.axoflow.io/rpm/stable/fedora-41/$basearch
enabled=1
gpgcheck=1
repo_gpgcheck=1
gpgkey=https://pkg.axoflow.io/axoflow-code-signing-pub.asc' > /dev/null
    sudo tee /etc/yum.repos.d/axosyslog.repo <<< '[axosyslog]
name=AxoSyslog
baseurl=https://pkg.axoflow.io/rpm/stable/fedora-40/$basearch
enabled=1
gpgcheck=1
repo_gpgcheck=1
gpgkey=https://pkg.axoflow.io/axoflow-code-signing-pub.asc' > /dev/null
    sudo tee /etc/yum.repos.d/axosyslog.repo <<< '[axosyslog]
name=AxoSyslog
baseurl=https://pkg.axoflow.io/rpm/stable/fedora-39/$basearch
enabled=1
gpgcheck=1
repo_gpgcheck=1
gpgkey=https://pkg.axoflow.io/axoflow-code-signing-pub.asc' > /dev/null

  3. Update the packages list.

    sudo yum update -y

    Expected output:

    AxoSyslog                                                                                                           544  B/s | 488  B     00:00    
AxoSyslog                                                                                                           5.2 kB/s | 3.2 kB     00:00    
Importing GPG key 0x5F25E107:
Userid     : "Axoflow Code Signing Key <support@axoflow.com>"
Fingerprint: 365A 4340 FA76 89B4 78ED 617C 3605 FFAD 5F25 E107
From       : https://pkg.axoflow.io/axoflow-code-signing-pub.asc
AxoSyslog                                                                                                            68 kB/s |  56 kB     00:00    
Extra Packages for Enterprise Linux 9 - x86_64                                                                      8.2 MB/s |  23 MB     00:02    
Extra Packages for Enterprise Linux 9 openh264 (From Cisco) - x86_64                                                1.1 kB/s | 2.5 kB     00:02    
Dependencies resolved.
Nothing to do.
Complete!

  4. Install AxoSyslog.

    • To install AxoSyslog with every available module, run:

      sudo yum install axosyslog-*

    • To install only the base package, run:

      sudo yum install axosyslog

      Then install other packages for the modules you want to use as needed. For example, to use the gRPC-based destinations (like loki() or opentelemetry()), install the axosyslog-grpc-* package. For HTTP-based destinations like elasticsearch-http() or sumologic-http(), you need the axosyslog-http-* package.

  5. Enable syslog-ng.

    sudo systemctl enable syslog-ng
sudo systemctl start syslog-ng

  6. (Optional) If you don’t want to run other log collectors on the host, you can delete the existing one (which is rsyslog by default):

    sudo yum remove rsyslog.x86_64

Using AxoSyslog

After you’ve installed AxoSyslog, you can configure it just like syslog-ng, using the same configurations files (/etc/syslog-ng/syslog-ng.conf by default). For details, see the Quick-start guide.

Getting help

If you run into any issues while installing or configuring AxoSyslog, or you have any questions, you can find us on our Discord server.