rsyslog/rsyslog

Health v2 · maintenance only

Adoption not part of the score

2329 stars · 732 forks observed · 2026-08-28

What it is AI-extracted, prompt v1, taxonomy v1, 2026-08-30, confidence not recorded

Rsyslog is a high-performance open-source log ingestion and ETL engine written in C, originally a syslog daemon and now a modular pipeline system for collecting, parsing, transforming, and routing event data. It supports 100+ input/output modules including Kafka, Elasticsearch, MongoDB, HTTP endpoints, and files, and can process over one million messages per second.

Use cases

• centralize syslog from many servers into one log store
• ship logs to elasticsearch for search and dashboards
• forward application logs to kafka
• parse and enrich log messages before routing
• collect linux journal and log files into a pipeline
• relay syslog over tcp and udp in containerized environments
• buffer logs reliably with disk-assisted queues
• filter and route log messages by severity or content

When to choose

• you need a battle-tested, very fast syslog server on linux
• you want a lightweight log shipper with modular inputs and outputs
• you need reliable buffering and forwarding of log data at scale
• you want to transform, normalize, or filter logs in a pipeline before storage

When to avoid

• you need a full log analytics UI with dashboards out of the box
• you prefer config-as-code in a general-purpose language rather than rainerscript
• your stack is windows-only and you cannot use the separate commercial windows agent

Facets

service · maturity stable

logging etl streaming message-queue search-engine monitoring monitoring backend infrastructure-as-code self-hosted windows self-hosted cli syslog log-aggregation log-processing kafka elasticsearch rainerscript log-forwarding c devops linux docker

Member repositories

For agents

markdown · JSON · MCP: product_card(name="rsyslog/rsyslog")