The loggen manual page

Name

loggen — Generate syslog messages at a specified rate

Note: If you don’t have AxoSyslog installed and want to run loggen from a container, you can use:

docker run --rm -ti --entrypoint "" ghcr.io/axoflow/axosyslog /usr/bin/loggen [options] target [port]

Synopsis

loggen [options] target [port]

Description

The loggen application is a tool to test and stress-test your syslog server and the connection to the server. It can send syslog messages to the server at a specified rate using a number of connection types and protocols, including TCP, UDP, and unix domain sockets. The messages can be generated automatically (repeating the PADDstring over and over), or read from a file or the standard input.

When loggen finishes sending the messages, it displays the following statistics:

• average rate: The average rate of the sent messages in messages/second.
• count: The total number of messages sent.
• time: The time required to send the messages in seconds.
• average message size: The average size of the sent messages in bytes.
• bandwidth: The average bandwidth used for sending the messages in kilobytes/second.

Options

• --active-connections <number-of-connections>

  Number of connections loggen will use to send messages to the destination. This option is usable only when using TCP or TLS connections to the destination. Default value: 1

  The loggen utility waits until every connection is established before starting to send messages. See also the --idle-connections option.

• --csv or -C

  Send the statistics of the sent messages to stdout as CSV. This can be used for plotting the message rate.

• --client-port

  Available in AxoSyslog 4.14 and later.

  Use the specified outbound port to connect to the server. Usable only for a single connection (when --active-connections is 1 and --idle-connections is not set).

• --dgram or -D

  Use datagram socket (UDP or unix-dgram) to send the messages to the target. Requires the --inet option as well.

• dont-parse or -d

  Do not parse the lines read from the input files, send them as received.

• --help or -h

  Display a brief help message.

• --idle-connection <number-of-connections>

  Number of idle connections loggen will establish to the destination. Note that loggen will not send any messages on idle connections, but the connection is kept open using keep-alive messages. This option is usable only when using TCP or TLS connections to the destination. See also the --active-connections option. Default value: 0

• --inet or -i

  Use the TCP (by default) or UDP (when used together with the --dgram option) protocol to send the messages to the target.

• --interval <seconds> or -I <seconds>

  The number of seconds loggen will run. Default value: 10

  Note When --interval and --number are used together, loggen will send messages until the period set in --interval expires or the amount of messages set in --number is reached, whichever happens first.

• --ipv6 or -6

  Specify the destination using its IPv6 address. Note that the destination must have a real IPv6 address.

• --loop-reading or -l

  Read the file specified in --read-file option in loop: loggen will start reading from the beginning of the file when it reaches the end of the file.

• --number <number-of-messages> or -n <number-of-messages>

  Number of messages to generate.

  Note When --interval and --number are used together, loggen will send messages until the period set in --interval expires or the amount of messages set in --number is reached, whichever happens first.

• --no-framing or -F

  Do not use the framing of the IETF-syslog protocol style, even if the --syslog-proto option is set.

• --perf

  Disables rate limiting to send as many messages as possible.

• --permanent or -T

  Keep sending logs indefinitely, without time limit.

• --quiet or -Q

  Display statistics only when loggen is finished. If not set, the statistics are displayed every second.

• --rate <message/second> or -r <message/second>

  The number of messages generated per second for every active connection. Default value: 1000. To disable rate limiting, use the --perf flag.

  If you want to change the message rate while loggen is running, send SIGUSR1 to double the message rate, or SIGUSR2 to halve it:

  kill -USR1 <loggen-pid>``kill -USR2 <loggen-pid>

• --read-file <filename> or -R <filename>

  Read the messages from a file and send them to the target. See also the --skip-tokens option.

  Specify - as the input file to read messages from the standard input (stdio). Note that when reading messages from the standard input, loggen can only use a single thread. The -R -parameters must be placed at end of command, like: loggen 127.0.0.1 1061 --read-file -

• --reconnect

  Try to reconnect when destination connections are lost.

• --sdata <data-to-send> or -p <data-to-send>

  Send the argument of the --sdata option as the SDATA part of IETF-syslog (RFC5424 formatted) messages. Use it together with the --syslog-proto option. For example: --sdata "[test name=\\"value\\"]

• --size <message-size> or -s <message-size>

  The size of a syslog message in bytes. Default value: 256. Minimum value: 127 bytes, maximum value: 8192 bytes.

• --skip-tokens <number>

  Skip the specified number of space-separated tokens (words) at the beginning of every line. For example, if the messages in the file look like foo bar message, --skip-tokens 2 skips the foo bar part of the line, and sends only the message part. Works only when used together with the --read-file parameter. Default value: 0

• --stream or -S

  Use a stream socket (TCP or unix-stream) to send the messages to the target.

• --syslog-proto or -P

  Use the new IETF-syslog message format as specified in RFC5424. By default, loggen uses the legacy BSD-syslog message format (as described in RFC3164). See also the --no-framing option.

• --unix </path/to/socket> or -x </path/to/socket>

  Use a UNIX domain socket to send the messages to the target.

• --use-ssl or -U

  Use an SSL-encrypted channel to send the messages to the target. Note that it is not possible to check the certificate of the target, or to perform mutual authentication.

• --version or -V

  Display version number of syslog-ng.

Examples

The following command generates 100 messages per second for ten minutes, and sends them to port 2010 of the localhost via TCP. Each message is 300 bytes long.

loggen --stream --size 300 --rate 100 --interval 600 127.0.0.1 2010

The following command is similar to the one above, but uses the UDP protocol.

loggen --inet --dgram --size 300 --rate 100 --interval 600 127.0.0.1 2010

Send a single message on TCP6 to the ::1 IPv6 address, port 1061:

loggen --stream --ipv6 --number 1 ::1 1061

Send a single message on UDP6 to the ::1 IPv6 address, port 1061:

loggen --ipv6 --dgram --number 1 ::1 1061

Send a single message using a unix domain-socket:

loggen --unix --stream --number 1 </path/to/socket>

Read messages from the standard input (stdio) and send them to the localhost:

loggen 127.0.0.1 1061 --stream --read-file -

Files

/opt/syslog-ng/bin/loggen

See also

syslog-ng.conf.5

Getting help

• The up-to-date documentation of AxoSyslog is available on the AxoSyslog documentation site.
• For news and notifications about AxoSyslog, visit the Axoflow blog.
• If you want to contact the developers directly to help with problems or report issues, contact us on Discord or GitHub.

This manual page is maintained by Axoflow