syslog-ng 2023 community activity report

As you might know, we have started Axoflow, our new company at the beginning of 2023, so the end of this year marks the end of our first year of working (among other projects) on syslog-ng. As retrospectives are common in this season, I thought it would be interesting to review our first year, and dug up some numbers and statistics from the syslog-ng git repository. So, here is our year with syslog-ng, 2023! (For statistical purposes, 2023 ended on December 15, but I always get my year in music summary from Spotify in the first half of December, so I guess that’s OK.)

First and foremost, let me thank everyone from the community who has contributed to syslog-ng in any way: by submitting patches, raising issues, testing, helping other users, and so on. We really appreciate your help, and hope to see you next year as well.

We counted 1647 commits, out of which 1517 are from Axoflow employees. That’s slightly over 92%. Fun fact: out of the 16084 commits that were contributed to syslog-ng since the beginning of the project, 9737 (60%) were made by people who are currently working at Axoflow.

All these commits make 2023 the 3rd most productive year for syslog-ng. Only 2018 and 2019 had more activity with ~1900 commits each, but note that in those years there were 8-9 people who contributed a significant portion of the changes, in contrast to the 4 this year.

Notable new syslog-ng features

• Typing support
• Proxy protocol v2
• Prometheus-style metrics
• User-configurable metrics via the metrics-probe() parser
• Named log paths and statistics
• Splunk HEC destination
• Smart multi-line parsing for backtraces
• Hypr source (community contribution)
• UDP load balancing with ebpf
• OpenTelemetry source and destination (see also the OpenTelemetry support in more detail in AxoSyslog and syslog-ng blog post)
• Source side message processing parallelization
• Crowdstrike Falcon LogScale destination (see also the From syslog-ng to LogScale: structured logs from any source blog post)
• syslog-ng to syslog-ng message transfer using the OpenTelemetry protocol (OTLP)
• Grafana Loki destination
• Amazon S3 destination
• OpenObserve destination
• Google PubSub destination
• PostgreSQL source

Other contributions

Axoflow also contributed around syslog-ng in the following ways:

• Created a cloud-ready syslog-ng distribution called AxoSyslog (container image and Helm chart)
• We have published an improved and updated open source documentation (see this blog post for a clarification on the differences between the AxoSyslog and syslog-ng documentation)
• We provide community support for syslog-ng on Discord. (In case you need commercial syslog-ng support, contact us https://axoflow.com/contact/.)
• Published 18 syslog-ng related blog posts

Conclusion

As you can see, 2023 was a really eventful year for syslog-ng, and we hope that the next year will be just as exciting.