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eventd - A syslog replacement

Goals

  • Establish a common format for log/event data
  • Establish a standard transport for log/event data
    • The transport provide reliable delivery, meaning the sender must get acknowledgment
  • Work with existing projects to integrate the new format/transport

Non-Goals

  • Replace all existing logging software with a different piece of logging software

Current landscape

What's wrong with syslog

  • Message loss possible even with TCP and TLS
    • Lack of ack'ing from the receiver side means logs can be lost in the transmission window
  • No ability to perform custom authentication / authorization
    • TLS supports cert auth, which is only useful within a single org unit
    • There is no stream metadata
  • RFC5424 structured logging barely used
    • Virtually no clients give access to it
  • Data treated as text blobs mostly

What's good about syslog

  • Simple protocol
    • Easy to implement
  • Highly visible, extremely well integrated already

What's wrong with rsyslog

  • Using structured logging is cumbersome
  • Difficult to configure
    • Undesirable config file format

What's good about rsyslog

  • High performance implementation
  • Lots of plugins to route data to various places
  • "A standard" amongst ops folks
  • Reliable sending via RELP
  • Exposes json data about logs

Why not systemd-journal

  • Few people using it for centralization
  • Only one implementation to read disk files
    • Disk format is purposfully underspecified for flexibility
  • Huge dependency if needed to be build freestanding
    • Rarely if ever run on anything but a modern Linux

What's good about systemd-journal

  • Integrated tooling to search and manipulate log data
  • Structured logging provides much more than just a string
    • Automatic addition of process context to each message

What about heka?

  • No syslog integration, requires users to switch to it entirely
  • Heavy overhead per message
    • UUID per
    • HMAC per
  • Highly configurable, not a great out of the box expeirence
  • No text format for the native format, makes it harder to interact with
  • Native TCP transport does not do reliable delivery

What's good about heka?

  • Structured logging at the bottom
    • Include units per attribute (seconds, milliseconds, uri, email, etc)
  • Reliable delivery via builtin TCP transport
  • Highly configurable, easy to route logs to interesting places
  • HTTP based input and outputs with header configuration

What's wrong with logstash?

  • No mandated format
    • Leaves users guessing on how to structured their data
  • Requiring java turns many users away
  • Difficult (if possible at all) to dynamicly detect different message encodings
    • Meaning sending json or plain text over syslog isn't possible without treating the json as plain text
  • Only supports minimal internal buffering
    • High volume servers with outputs that go away for even a moment grind to a halt
    • Highly impactful when coupled with reliable delivery output plugins

What's good about logstash?

  • Highly, highly configurable
  • Supports syslog
  • An ecosystem of existing shippers to get logs into the system

What's wrong with GELF?

  • UDP usage is recommended and is not reliable at the network and application layer
  • Mandates compression per message, increasing processing power per message significantly
  • Forces users into awkward underscore prefixed notation to send structured data (ie, not canonical JSON)
  • Timestamps don't mandate nanosecond precision
  • No reliable transmission of log data
    • Graylog mentions an HTTP input plugin, but no documentation could be found
    • Unknown if an HTTP output plugin exists

What's good about GELF?

  • Lots of libraries, makes application integration easy
  • Native structured logging mechanism
  • An ecosystem of plugins support various transports

What's wrong with fluentd?

  • Custom forwarding protocol, makes interoperating difficult
    • Enabling reliable mode of protocol slightly confusing, off by default
  • Secure version of the protocol handled by separate plugin that doesn't support reliable delivery
  • No ability to detect and switch formats automatically

What's good about fluentd?

  • Custom protocol handles load balancing and fail over
    • Though lack of acking makes this process pretty lossy
  • Structured logging via JSON and MessagePack
  • Ability to integrate with syslog
  • Large ecosystem of plugins to give users maximum flexibility

What's wrong with flume?

  • No structured logging support
    • Events are a header (string map) and body (bytes)
  • Effectively custom protocols for introducing data reliably
    • Avro and Thrift have very small mindshares wrt logging
  • Very technical configuration
    • Hard for users to get started with it
  • JSON format not canonical for existing JSON events
    • Sepearate header/body subobjects
    • Timestamp is a quoted number
  • No ability to provide authentication/authorization with sinks

What's good about flume?

  • A few reliable protocols for users to pick from (including HTTP)
  • Well documented ability to form pipelines between flume instances
  • Nice set of source types gives users flexibility
  • Utilization of batching as a core concept
  • Large ecosystem of plugins for maximum flexibility
  • The ability to overflow data to disk if outputs are backing up
  • Ad-hoc protocol definition (data delimited by pipe characters)
  • Expects to piggy back on syslog
  • Overly specific regarding network events
    • Seems like it was designed with IPS integration in mind
    • Items such as device vendor, product, and version hardcoded even though rarely used in general logging

What's good about CEF

  • Very short specification, easy to implement
  • Specifies a key dictionary to help with interop

What's wrong with CEE (http://cee.mitre.org)

  • Project appears to be dead
  • Mandates supporting both JSON and XML for data formatting
  • Lengthy specificication, easy for implementors to diverge and skip sections
  • Ambigious transport specification
    • For instance: "The CLT protocol shall maintain integrity mechanisms to resist to tampering by local administrator". What does that mean in the context of implementation?
  • Wire transport appears to simply piggy back on syslog, thus not reliable

What's good about CEE?

  • Usage of tagging to switch decoding in ambigious context
    • @cee: prefix in syslog message
  • JSON representation is canonical JSON, easy for implementation
  • Establishes a field dictionary to assist in event interop

What's wrong with metrics2.0 (http://metrics20.org)

  • Project appears to be dead
  • Wire transport lacks reliable delivery, making it unfit for important data
  • Wire transport is ad-hoc
  • Fails to specify a transport
    • Interoperability unlikely
  • Only used by a few projects

What's good about metrics2.0

  • Uses a structured format for all data
  • Separates data from meta-data within each item
  • Mandates a unit is applied to a value
  • Specifies a key dictionary to help with interop

Feature breakdown and comparison

Structured Logging format

  • Support for JSON as a first class structured format is high
    • Flume's support is a misnomer, the users data isn't structured
  • Syslog can carry JSON in the message body when necessary
  • Fluentd also supports MessagePack and uses it as it's internal wire protocol too
  • Logstash's JSON is the most generic, mandating only @timestamp and @version
  • Heka uses an internal protobuf representation of the data
  • Using JSON only brings some typical questions:
    • Can large integers be represented as native numbers properly? Or do we resort to quoted numbers?
    • How should timestamps be represented?
      • There is a large question about leap second visibility in events as well
    • How should binary values be represented?
      • Systemd represents them as an integer of numbers
      • Golang represents them by base64 encoding the binary
      • A subobject would have to used to transmit the proper data to the receiver in either case
Open Questions
  • Should there be a common binary format as well as text (likely JSON at this point)?
  • Would a binary format allow for faster aggregator handling?

Transport

  • syslog protocol is the only common format support (and some don't even support it)
  • Every project has their own native (ie, ad-hoc) protocol
  • A common protocol would reduce bugs in all projects and increase usefulness
    • Each reliable delivery protocol uses slightly different, ad-hoc rules to enforce reliability
  • Existing reliable delivery protocols utilize head blocking, meaning they're the same as batch sending
  • Primary downside of sender side batching is the receiver side doesn't see the flow of messages even if reliable delivery would cause the sender to block like it was a batch
    • This can be mitigating with HTTP by having the client start a "long POST" and trickle the data across the wire as it comes in
    • This still requires the sender to buffer data in case receiver crashes or returns non-200

Desired Features

Reliable Delivery

  • Messages must be ack'd by the receiver side
    • Preferably done in batches/windows to keep performance up
  • Never lose messages to increase performance

Authentication

  • A stream of messages should be able to carry stream-wide authentication/authorization info
  • Using TLS certificate checks is not enough
    • Difficult to adminster when dealing with large number of client certs
  • Currently no log protocols or routers do this

Structured Logging

  • Makes the log system into a true data-rich event system
  • Turns logs into a database system
  • LEARN: Heka's value unit is really interesting, gives an extra dimesion to the structured data

Syslog integration

  • Needs the ability to accept and process syslog formatted data always
    • Can't just leave existing infrastructure high and dry
    • Want to give them an easy path into a better world
    • Opens the door for simply relays: syslog sends data to eventd on localhost, which sends it elsewhere reliabily

Implementation

Transport over HTTP/1 and HTTP/2

  • Piggy back on well established tooling for sending batches of data and acking them
  • Persistent connections keeps it on par with spitting syslog out a TCP session
  • Remote side crashing mid batch detected
    • Remote side can reject batches via HTTP codes
  • HTTP based authentication well understood
    • Authentication header
      • BasicAuth
      • Bearer Tokens
  • Host based routing allows for servers to aggregate logs for many different orgs and separate them out easily
  • Servers can throttle clients to induce backpressure and keep the system running
  • Content-Encodings such as gzip can be utilized transparently
The bad
  • Slows down "realtime" aspects by a fixed interval to allow for a batch to fill. Can be as low as 5s.
  • Clients have to have strategy for when server is failing
    • Problem can be mitigated by using on-node forwarders that deal with this issue

Protobuf native format

  • Well oiled binary protocol readers for every language
    • Easy to write new tools/implementations in various languages
  • Compact and unambigious, improving ability to understand and evolve specification
The bad
  • Not plain text, requires tools to read
  • Requires some custom framing for unterminated, append only files
    • Can be as minimal as a varint size header

Canonical JSON format

  • Events can be represented in JSON such that common types and formats are presented in the canonical way
  • All tooling capable of reading and writing JSON rather than protobuf
The bad

Ambiguity created when a unit needs to be applied to a ground type value (string, number, etc):

{
  "duration": {
    "value": 3242,
    "unit": "ms"
  }
}

It's not clear if this is an value with a unit or an arbitrary user object.

Solution

One solution is be flexible with the input format for clients that don't want/need to know about our extended features (such as units). That means that we need a signal value to indicate that the JSON is using our non-canonical schema.

  • Option 1: Transport mimetype indicates which schema is used
  • Option 2: Toplevel object key which indicates the schema. Could be @version: 2 or @schema: "enhanced" or something else
  • Option 3: Becuase units are the reason a ground value might be wrapped in an object, use a specially worded unit key to switch off, such as @unit

Syslog listener

  • Support /dev/log protocol as well as UDP and TCP syslog protocols transparently

Unknown features

HMAC

  • Supported by heka and systemd-journal
  • Is HMAC on individual messages really needed?
  • Can/should HMAC be done on batches?
  • Who verifies HMAC signatures and when?

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A RFC of a syslog replacement

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