syslog-ng and AxoSyslog documentation updates 2023-08

When we announced the AxoSyslog Core documentation a little over a month ago, it was basically a reformatted and rebranded version of the original syslog-ng documentation (which at the time of this writing corresponds to syslog-ng version 3.38), but with some usability enhancements, like easier navigation, improved layout, faster load times, and better on-site search. (If you want to know the details about why we have separate documentation of AxoSyslog, our syslog-ng distribution and how it relates to the syslog-ng documentation, read our syslog-ng documentation and similarities with AxoSyslog Core blog post.)

We spent a lot of time getting the documentation to catch up with the actual syslog-ng and AxoSyslog releases, and I’m happy to say that we covered most of the new features from the syslog-ng 4.0-4.3 releases. So to help you find the relevant documentation sections for the main features, here is a list of links:

OpenTelemetry

• OpenTelemetry source
• OpenTelemetry destination
• OpenTelemetry parser

New sources

• Hypr Audit Trail and Hypr App Audit Trail
• OpenTelemetry

New destinations

• Falcon LogScale
• OpenTelemetry
• Splunk HEC

New parsers

• group-lines
• Count the messages that pass through the log path (metrics-probe)
• OpenTelemetry
• RFC5424 structured data (SDATA) parser

Other

• Typing support (Specifying data types in value-pairs)
• Nonsequential message processing for improved performance
• An overview of writing Python modules for syslog-ng
• New syslog-ng-ctl commands
• Configuration identifier
• Named log paths
• format-date template function
• TLS improvements: OCSP stapling verification and SSL_CONF_cmd support

New global options

• log-level
• stats

TODO

The only major feature from the recent releases that is yet to be documented is the new, Prometheus-like metrics system – we hope to add it in the coming weeks. Also, it seems that the documentation is currently missing from the Google index, we are working on fixing that too.

Conclusion

As always, pull requests and feedback is welcome. We have also fixed several formatting errors, but there might still be some left, so if you find one, or run into similar problems, or you just feel that some part of the docs is unclear, open a documentation issue.