Repository files navigation

For detailed look at the goals, design, and implementation of this project, check outthese blog posts.

Ekanite is a high-performance syslog server with built-in text search. Its goal is to do a couple of things, and do them well -- accept log messages over the network, and make it easy to search the messages. What it lacks in feature, it makes up for in focus. Built inGo, it has no external dependencies, which makes deployment easy.

Features include:

• Supports reception of log messages over UDP, TCP, and TCP with TLS.
• Full text search of all received log messages.
• Full parsing ofRFC5424 headers.
• Log messages are indexed by parsed timestamp, if one is available. This means search results are presented in the order the messages occurred, not in the order they were received, ensuring sensible display even with delayed senders.
• Automatic data-retention management. Ekanite deletes indexed log data older than a configurable time period.
• Not aJVM in sight.

Search is implemented using thebleve search library. For some performance analysis of bleve, and of the sharding techniques used by Ekanite, check outthis post.

The quickest way to get running on OSX and Linux is to download a pre-built release binary. You can find these binaries on theGithub releases page. Once installed, you can start Ekanite like so:

ekanited -datadir~/ekanite_data# Or any directory of your choice.

To see all Ekanite options pass-h on the command line.

If you want to build Ekanite, either because you want the latest code or a pre-built binary for platform is not available, take a look atCONTRIBUTING.md.

For now, for Ekanite to accept logs, your syslog client must be configured such that the log lines areRFC5424 compliant, and in the following format:

<PRI>VERSION TIMESTAMP HOSTNAME APP-NAME PROC-ID MSGID MSG"

Consult the RFC to learn what each of these fields is. The TIMESTAMP field must be inRFC3339 format. Bothrsyslog andsyslog-ng support templating, which make itvery easy for those programs to format logs correctly and transmit the logs to Ekanite. Templates and installation instructions for both systems are below.

rsyslog

# Send messages to Ekanite over TCP using the template. Assumes Ekanite is listening on 127.0.0.1:5514$template Ekanite,"<%pri%>%protocol-version% %timestamp:::date-rfc3339% %HOSTNAME% %app-name% %procid% - %msg%\n"*.*             @@127.0.0.1:5514;Ekanite

Add this template to/etc/rsyslog.d/23-ekanite.conf and then restart rsyslog using the commandsudo service rsyslog restart.

syslog-ng

source s_ekanite {system();# Check which OS & collect system logsinternal();# Collect syslog-ng logs};template Ekanite { template("<${PRI}>1 ${ISODATE} ${HOST} ${PROGRAM} ${PID} - $MSG\n"); template_escape(no) };destination d_ekanite {tcp("127.0.0.1" port(5514) template(Ekanite));};log {source(s_ekanite);destination(d_ekanite);};

Add this template to/etc/syslog-ng/syslog-ng.conf and then restart syslog-ng using the command/etc/init.d/syslog-ng restart.

With these changes in place rsyslog or syslog-ng will continue to send logs to any existing destination, and also forward the logs to Ekanite.

Search support is pretty simple at the moment. You have two options -- a simple telnet-like interface, and a browser-based query interface.

Telnet to the query server (see the command line options) and enter a search term. The query language supported is the simple language supported bybleve, but a more sophisiticated query syntax, including searching for specific field values, may be supported soon.

For example, below is an example search session, showing accesses to the login URL of a Wordpress site. The telnet clients connects to the query server and enters the stringlogin

$ telnet 127.0.0.1 9950Trying 127.0.0.1...Connected to 127.0.0.1.Escape character is '^]'.login<134>0 2015-05-05T23:50:17.025568+00:00 fisher apache-access - - 65.98.59.154 - - [05/May/2015:23:50:12 +0000] "GET /wp-login.php HTTP/1.0" 200 206 "-" "-"<134>0 2015-05-06T01:24:41.232890+00:00 fisher apache-access - - 104.140.83.221 - - [06/May/2015:01:24:40 +0000] "GET /wp-login.php?action=register HTTP/1.0" 200 206 "http://www.philipotoole.com/" "Opera/9.80 (Windows NT 6.2; Win64; x64) Presto/2.12.388 Version/12.17"<134>0 2015-05-06T01:24:41.232895+00:00 fisher apache-access - - 104.140.83.221 - - [06/May/2015:01:24:40 +0000] "GET /wp-login.php?action=register HTTP/1.1" 200 243 "http://www.philipotoole.com/wp-login.php?action=register" "Opera/9.80 (Windows NT 6.2; Win64; x64) Presto/2.12.388 Version/12.17"<134>0 2015-05-06T02:47:54.612953+00:00 fisher apache-access - - 184.68.20.22 - - [06/May/2015:02:47:51 +0000] "GET /wp-login.php HTTP/1.1" 200 243 "-" "Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 6.1) AppleWebKit/537.1 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/24.0.1309.0 Safari/537.17"<134>0 2015-05-06T04:20:49.008609+00:00 fisher apache-access - - 193.104.41.186 - - [06/May/2015:04:20:46 +0000] "POST /wp-login.php HTTP/1.1" 200 206 "-" "Opera 10.00"

Perhaps you only want to search forPOST accesses to that URL:

login -GET<134>0 2015-05-06T04:20:49.008609+00:00 fisher apache-access - - 193.104.41.186 - - [06/May/2015:04:20:46 +0000] "POST /wp-login.php HTTP/1.1" 200 206 "-" "Opera 10.00"

A more sophisticated client program is planned.

The browser-based interface also accepts bleve-style queries, identical to those described in theTelnet section. By default the browser interface is available athttp://localhost:8080. An example session is shown below.

Basic statistics and diagnostics are available. Visithttp://localhost:9951/debug/vars to retrieve this information. The host and port can be changed via the-diag command-line option.

The architecture now supports the easy implementation of new parsers beyond the stock syslog in 3 easy steps:

1. Ininput/parser.go expand supportedFormats() to capture the additionalstandard andname.
2. Inparser/, create the new input format parser using appropriate regex statements.
   • Ensure that the new parser includes atimestamp field compatible with RFC3339, e.g.2006-01-02T15:04:05Z07:00
3. Back ininput/parser.go, update NewParser() to properly instantiate the new input format parser.

The project is not actively maintained, though development may re-occur in the future.