Below is the list of blog posts with the “syslog” tag.

Syslog is the standard protocol that devices, operating systems, and applications use to send event messages to a log collector. NXLog Platform collects, parses, and forwards messages in both BSD (RFC 3164) and IETF (RFC 5424) formats with a single extension. Most security telemetry still travels as syslog at some point in its life. Firewalls, switches, Linux hosts, hypervisors, and a long list of security products emit it, and every major SIEM ingests it.

When you reconstruct an incident across firewalls, endpoints, and application logs, the timestamps rarely agree. One source records Oct 10 13:55:36 with no year and no time zone. A Zeek log two racks over emits 1760104536.225121. The firewall already speaks 2025-10-10T13:55:36.003Z. Until every one of those is converted to a single format and time zone, your event timeline is an estimate. The fix is timestamp normalization: convert each timestamp to ISO 8601 in UTC at the point of collection, before the data reaches your SIEM.

Plaintext syslog crossing a network boundary in 2026 is a finding waiting to happen. The IETF defined encrypted syslog years ago in RFC 5425: TCP/6514, mutual TLS where the trust model needs it. What still trips teams up is rarely the protocol itself — it’s certificate lifecycle, framing mismatches, and forwarders that fall over when the collector blinks. Here’s the short version: which standards matter, where teams break the framing, and the four operational habits that decide whether the pipeline holds up.

Well, no doubt logging is the nervous system of any IT infrastructure. From troubleshooting outages to satisfying compliance audits and threat management, having the right log management pipeline can make the difference between smooth operations and chaotic firefighting. For decades, syslog-ng and rsyslog have been two of the most widely used log management tools for Unix and Linux environments. Both provide implementations of the original 1980s syslog protocol and are designed to collect, process, and forward log messages across networks.

syslog-ng and NXLog are both powerful log collectors providing flexible log processing. However, you might be in a position where you need to switch from syslog-ng to NXLog. Whether it’s because syslog-ng doesn’t support an operating system or you want to upgrade your log collection solution to one that can be centrally managed, converting your syslog-ng configuration to NXLog is a simple task. How do syslog-ng and NXLog differ? syslog-ng and NXLog are alike in many ways.