rsyslog journal support

We expect that rsyslog and the systemd journal will be found together in quite some szenarios (if you are curios on what exactly we mean, check the “rsyslog vs. journal?” posting).

As such, it makes a lot of sense to think about providing integration facilities. Thanks to rsyslog’s modular architecture, it wasn’t very hard to provide the necessary building blocks. In the 7.3 experimental branch, two new modules (omjournal and imjournal) have been developed. They provide the capability to write to the journal as well as pull data out of it. Usually, the latter is not really necessary, as journald still provides log messages to the system log socket. But unfortunately, journal developers have decided only to pass on a subset of the logging information. They exclude the structured data content. However, such data is only available if their own logging API is being used by applications, and this is currently not really the case. So right now using just the regular system log socket input should be sufficient in almost all cases. Howerver, should structured data become more prominent in the journal, using imjournal gains rsyslog access to it.

For some more background information on the integration, you can also watch a quick presentation that I recorded: