What this book is about

This book offers a cookbook-approach to configuring rsyslog. While the official documentation focusses on concepts, components and configuration statements, this book takes a completely different approach. It will not tell you about rsyslog concepts. Instead, it will offer a wide-range of recipies for configuring rsyslog so that it performs some specific task.

The individual recipies are presented with a problem description, some key facts (if necessary), required rsyslog version and the necessary configuration statements. These statements do their job, but not more. I tried to make the configurations reusable and free of side-effects. So you should be able to combine some of these recipies to form a final configuration that works exactly like you need it – just from applying the recipies. The core idea is that this should work just like in real cooking – there, you combine several recipies to create a great five-course meal. However, in cooking there are some recipies that you usually can not combine well within a single meal. The rsyslog equivalent is configurations with side effects, which may not always avoidable. If one of the configurations here has side-effects, you will be warned. It then probably is better to think twice before combining it.