SecurityDocs: Writing Syslog Messages to MySQL

“In this paper, I describe how to write syslog messages to a
MySQL database. Having syslog messages in a database is often
handy, especially when you intend to set up a front-end for viewing
them. This paper describes an approach with rsyslogd, an
alternative enhanced syslog daemon natively supporting MySQL. I
describe the components needed to be installed and how to configure
them.

“In many cases, syslog data is simply written to text files.
This approach has some advantages, most notably it is very fast and
efficient. However, data stored in text files is not readily
accessible for real-time viewing and analysis. To do that, the
messages need to be in a database. There are various ways to store
syslog messages in a database. For example, some have the syslogd
write text files which are later feed via a separate script into
the database. Others have written scripts taking the data (via a
pipe) from a non-database-aware syslogd and store them as they
appear. Some others use database-aware syslogds and make them write
the data directly to the database…”

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