SyslogFormate

SyslogFormate is a term used to describe the structured approach to formatting syslog messages for transmission and consumption by log collectors, SIEMs, and analytics pipelines. It encompasses the conventions used to organize fields such as the timestamp, hostname, application name, process identifier, message identifier, and the log payload, as well as optional structured data that accompanies a log event. SyslogFormate is not a single formal standard; rather, it represents a family of formatting patterns applied across different systems and vendors to improve parsing, filtering, and correlation of events.

A common foundation for SyslogFormate is alignment with the RFC 5424 standard, which specifies the content and order of fields in a canonical syslog message, including PRI, VERSION, TIMESTAMP, HOSTNAME, APP-NAME, PROCID, MSGID, STRUCTURED-DATA, and MSG. Implementations may also adopt JSON or key‑value encodings within STRUCTURED-DATA or MSG to enable easier programmatic processing and interoperability with modern data pipelines.

Variants and implementations: In practice, SyslogFormate includes RFC 5424-compliant forms as well as custom formats that wrap or replace parts of the traditional structure with human- or machine-readable encodings. Log shippers and servers such as rsyslog, syslog-ng, Fluentd, and Logstash provide configuration options to emit, transform, or normalize messages toward a SyslogFormate-compatible structure.

Considerations include portability across platforms, time stamps and time zones, message size limits, character encoding, and security implications when transporting untrusted log data. See also Syslog, RFC 5424, Structured Data, JSON logging.