This guide has been archived.

The information in this guide is very old and likely no longer applicable to current versions of Graylog. Please take that into account when reading the following content.

Sending Syslog via AMQP into Graylog

If your setup does not allow direct communication from all hosts to the Graylog Server or your Graylog Server is located inside a private Network you could use AMQP as Transport. You will need to have an AMQP Server like rabbitMQ reachable by all Hosts. But it's easy to secure this communication if transport is over an insecure wire. Forget more Information please read the rabbitMQ SSL Guide.

This Guide will not give you a complete copy&paste how-to,
but it will guide you and provide additional information.

Please do not follow the steps if you did not know how to deal
with common issues yourself.   

In this scenario a Syslog message will have the following stages:

• transformed into JSON by rsyslog
• send from rsyslog to logstash via TCP/UDP
• send from logstash to rabbitMQ
• consumed by graylog from rabbitMQ
• Syslog extracted from JSON by Graylog

We will assume that you have a rabbitMQ running on amqp.ext.example.org (203.0.113.2) and your Graylog Instance is running on graylog.int.example.org (192.168.0.10). Additional we have the Linux System syslog.o1.example.org (198.51.100.1) and syslog.o2.example.org (192.0.2.1) that will send Syslog Data. All Systems are running ubuntu so you might need to adjust some configuration path settings.

prepare rabbitMQ

If no AMQP Broker is present, install rabbitMQ on amqp.ext.example.org and create a user for log delivery on CLI.

rabbitmqctl add_user my_rabbite_mq_user_here my_super_secure_password_rabbit_mq_password
rabbitmqctl set_permissions -p / my_rabbite_mq_user_here ".*" ".*" ".*"

If this Server is available in the wild please enable SSL in your Setup. A Management GUI can be installed with a few commands and an admin User is Created similar to the User creation above.

listeners.ssl.1 = 5671                  # this is the secure port for rabbitmq
#ssl_options.verify               = verify_peer
#ssl_options.fail_if_no_peer_cert = true
ssl_options.cacertfile           = /path/ssl/ca.crt
ssl_options.certfile             = /path/ssl/ssl/yourserver.crt
ssl_options.keyfile              = /path/ssl/yourserver.key

send messages on rsyslog

With rsyslog, you can use templates to format how messages should look like. Formatting the messages direct at the source will help to have a clean message from the source to the destination.

To identify the messages with the Full Qualified Domain Name of the System that has created the message we use the Option PreserveFQDN - but you will need to have a clean working hostname resolution.

rsyslog will send the message via UDP to the local running logstash.

$PreserveFQDN on
template(name="ls_json"
         type="list"
         option.json="on") {
           constant(value="{")
             constant(value="\"@timestamp\":\"")     property(name="timereported" dateFormat="rfc3339")
             constant(value="\",\"@version\":\"1")
             constant(value="\",\"message\":\"")     property(name="msg")
             constant(value="\",\"host\":\"")        property(name="hostname")
             constant(value="\",\"severity\":\"")    property(name="syslogseverity-text")
             constant(value="\",\"facility\":\"")    property(name="syslogfacility-text")
             constant(value="\",\"programname\":\"") property(name="programname")
             constant(value="\",\"procid\":\"")      property(name="procid")
           constant(value="\"}\n")
         }

*.* @127.0.0.1:5514;ls_json

The configuration above need to be placed inside the /etc/rsyslog.d/90-logstash.conf on syslog.01.example.org and syslog.o2.example.org in our example and rsyslog need to be restarted (service rsyslog restart).

route messages with logstash

As of writing this, rsyslog was not able to send messages direct to AMQP on Ubuntu, so we need to use logstash for the transport.

Logstash will listen on localhost port udp/5514 for the messages that are coming from rsyslog and forward them to the rabbitMQ Server.

input {
    UDP {
        port => 5514
        host => "127.0.0.1"
        type => syslog
        codec => "json"
        }
}

filter {
  # This replaces the host field (UDP source) with the host that generated the message (sysloghost)
  if [sysloghost] {
      mutate {
          replace => [ "host", "%{sysloghost}" ]
          remove_field => "sysloghost" # prune the field after successfully replacing "host"
        }
      }
}

output {
    rabbitmq {
      exchange => "log-messages"
        exchange_type => "fanout"
        key => "log-messages"
        host => "amqp.ext.example.org"
        durable => true
        persistent => true
        port => 5672
        user => "my_rabbite_mq_user_here"
        password => "my_super_secure_password_rabbit_mq_password"
        verify_ssl => true  # we assume that you have a valid certificate!
      }
    }

consume messages with graylog

Now the Data need to be consumed by graylog. Create an input with the Input Syslog AMQP. Add the Information that is configured in the former steps (exchange, username, password, hostname). Set the Option Allow overwrite date.

Start the Input to consume the first messages and create a JSON extractor. Additional create a second extractor on the field host and the type copy input and store it in the field source. You might want a third copy input to store @timestamp in timestamp.

what's next?

Use the rsyslog Systems as Syslog Proxies for every possible source in the same network, add more systems to your setup.

Credits

• untergeek for rsyslog / json template and the blogpost
• IETF for documentation ips
• StackOverflow User Gabriele for the answer how to create User on CLI