A Syslog-ng alternative

Yes. For virtually all use cases that Syslog-ng covers (system log collection, parsing, and forwarding), NXLog Platform can be used as a direct replacement with equivalent or superior functionality. You can ingest the same log sources and output to the same destinations – plus many more – using NXLog’s configuration. In practice, NXLog Platform can do everything Syslog-ng does, and then some, making migration straightforward for common scenarios.

Absolutely. NXLog Platform is vendor-neutral and designed to integrate with any log analysis or SIEM platform. Whether you use Splunk, ELK/Elastic Stack, Graylog, Datadog, Loggly, or anything else, NXLog Platform can feed it. In fact, many organizations deploy NXLog Platform in front of their SIEM to filter and enrich data before forwarding. You won’t need to change your downstream tools – NXLog Platform will make them more effective by improving the quality and consistency of log data.

NXLog Platform has built-in support for SNMP v1, v2c, and v3 traps. It uses the User-based Security Model (USM) for SNMP v3, meaning you can configure authentication and encryption for trap messages. The traps are parsed into structured fields without needing any external parser. Beyond SNMP, NXLog Platform supports protocols like MQTT, AMQP, and can even capture Windows Event Tracing for Windows (ETW) events – things outside Syslog-ng’s scope. It’s truly a one-stop shop for collecting diverse machine data securely.

With NXLog Platform, no extra forwarder is needed. The NXLog agent on Windows uses a native module (im_msvistalog) to read from the Windows Event Log API, so it captures events (including their full detail and XML) directly. This contrasts with Syslog-ng setups that often required a separate “syslog-ng Agent for Windows” or reliance on Windows Event Forwarding. NXLog Platform simplifies this by doing it all in one agent. You install NXLog Platform on the Windows machine and it handles everything – Application, Security, System logs, custom event channels, etc. – and forwards them in your desired format. It’s efficient and preserves rich event data, unlike some Syslog-ng solutions that might lose detail by converting events to text.

Yes, NXLog Platform is built for enterprise scale and reliability. It can handle very high event rates on a single server and you can horizontally scale by deploying more agents/relays if needed (just as you would with Syslog-ng). More importantly, NXLog Platform includes features to prevent data loss during outages – for example, it supports disk buffering (storing logs on disk if the network is down or the destination is slow) and automatic failover routing. If your primary log receiver goes down, NXLog Platform can switch to a secondary target until the primary is back, ensuring continuity. It also has built-in load balancing to distribute load across multiple receivers. These capabilities mean your logging pipeline remains robust under stress or failures. Many users find NXLog’s resilience to be a key improvement over simpler Syslog-ng setups, which might require more manual intervention to achieve the same level of fault tolerance.