"Managing Linux system and application logging is important and a bit tricksy. You want to capture important information, not bales of noise. You need to be able to find what you want in your logs without making it your life's work. The venerable old syslogd has served nobly for many years, but it's not quite up to meeting more complex needs. For this we have the next-generation Linux logger, syslog-ng.
"Syslog-ng has a number of advantages over our old friend syslogd: better networking support, highly-configurable filters, centralized network logging, and lots more flexibility. For example, with syslogd all iptables messages get dumped in kern.log along with all the other kernel messages. Syslog-ng lets you direct iptables messages to a separate logfile. Syslogd uses only UDP; syslog-ng runs over UDP and TCP, so you can run it over encrypted network tunnels to a central logging server..."
