NXLog Enterprise Edition 5 has been with us for nearly four years. That’s four years of being an industry-leading log collection tool adored by engineering teams and Fortune 100 customers around the globe. And while the NXLog Enterprise Edition 5 story isn’t yet over, it needs to move forward to keep pace with modern technologies and new demands.
Like any good muscle car, NXLog EE 5 has its limits, and so back in 2022 we came face-to-face with a problem - it required too much to change under the hood to stay modern and effective. From that moment, our R&D teams started working on an NXLog Enterprise Edition 6 branch of the product. Since the fall of 2023 - when NXLog Enterprise Edition 6.0 was released - NXLog EE 5 has continued to receive maintenance updates. However, most of the new and highly requested features cannot be backported from NXLog EE 6 because of a significantly different internal architecture.
There are a lot of advantages NXLog EE 6 has already implemented, and the gap between branches is growing fast, so we are here to encourage you to start migrating from NXLog EE 5 to NXLog EE 6, for a better user experience and much-improved performance. Let’s check out what benefits you get by migrating from good-old NXLog EE 5 to the new kid on the block.
1. Better compatibility
For a log collection pipeline in production, it’s important to keep its ability to scale up to as many systems as possible. But even with a relatively small but heterogeneous IT infrastructure, your log collection solution is going to lose its agility with time, posing a serious challenge to observability and security monitoring. It’s quite a pity having a ransomware actor playing in your gray zone, isn’t it?
NXLog Enterprise Edition is well known for its wide list of supported operating systems, from legacy Windows and *nix to very up-to-date systems, including the latest Amazon Linux and macOS versions. We continue extending our OS roster in NXLog EE version 6 - introducing support for Debian 10 and Debian 11 on ARM64 architecture. Most importantly, customers onboarded with NXLog EE 6 will continue getting new OS support advantages first.
2. Better integration capabilities
One of the key demands from our customers is to reduce the onboarding costs for new systems being incorporated into your log collection pipeline, both for operations and security monitoring. And NXLog Enterprise Edition 5 was extremely helpful in this regard (thanks to its powerful processing engine), and was capable enough to integrate virtually any data input with any kind of output. Even still, integration tasks require a definite amount of work to be done in terms of product configuration, which is not always simple. So, we’ve done our best to make it easier with NXLog EE 6 by enhancing our configuration language and improving the available modules.
For instance, from NXLog Enterprise Edition 6.0, in addition to basic data types, our configuration language now supports built-in complex data types like arrays and hashmaps, which help to simplify data handling and make configurations smaller and easier to maintain.
The same NXLog EE 6.0 provided Elasticsearch users (om_elasticsearch) with Elastic Data Streams support for seamless integration with their database. And from NXLog Enterprise Edition 6.1 our team provided Google Chronicle (om_chronicle) and Apache Kafka (om_kafka) users with the capability to configure data schemas dynamically, where they can be easily defined in NXLog configurations and make the configurations 50% smaller in some cases.
For those security engineers who look for deeper HTTP(S) (im_http) insights, request header processing is supported from NXLog EE 6.1, allowing you to detect crawlers, filter and enrich your logs, or correlate events.
3. Better performance
For NXLog Enterprise Edition 6 customers, there is a new Compression directive available for Microsoft Azure Logs Ingestion, Google Chronicle, Google Cloud Logging, Salesforce, and other modules. With this feature, you can achieve up to a 40% compression rate, which will help reduce bandwidth usage and cut data transfer costs.
4. Better security
Many of our customers use NXLog for cybersecurity monitoring purposes and we continue to introduce helpful security-related features in NXLog Enterprise Edition 6.
From NXLog EE 6.1, our customers can ensure secure log transfer with hardware-based encryption on the Microsoft Windows platform. NXLog Enterprise Edition (im_ssl) now supports certificates signed with keys generated by a Trusted Platform Module (TPM) chip. Those customers who implement integrity monitoring policies with our im_fim module can now enjoy uniform support for filesystem symbolic links, available from NXLog EE 6.2.
Start your migration now!
We believe these reasons, as well as a host of other, always-increasing reasons, are convincing for customers to plan their migration from existing NXLog Enterprise Edition versions to NXLog Enterprise Edition 6. We encourage you to check out the migration guide we have prepared for you beforehand. It’s short and simple, ensuring your transition from version 5 to version 6 is smooth and convenient for you and your engineering team.
