Important

You are viewing documentation for an older version of Confluent Platform. For the latest, click here.

Kafka Connect Syslog Source Connector

Use the Syslog connector to receive data from network devices. Supported formats are rfc 3164, rfc 5424, and CEF.

Important

This connector listens on a network port. Running more than one task or running in distributed mode can cause some undesired effects if another task already has the port open. It is recommended that you run this connector in Standalone Workers.

Install Syslog Source Connector

You can install this connector by using the Confluent Hub client (recommended) or you can manually download the ZIP file.

Install the connector using Confluent Hub

Prerequisite
Confluent Hub Client must be installed. This is installed by default with Confluent Enterprise.

Navigate to your Confluent Platform installation directory and run this command to install the latest (latest) connector version. The connector must be installed on every machine where Connect will be run.

confluent-hub install confluentinc/kafka-connect-syslog:latest

You can install a specific version by replacing latest with a version number. For example:

confluent-hub install confluentinc/kafka-connect-syslog:5.0.0

Install Connector Manually

Download and extract the ZIP file for your connector and then follow the manual connector installation instructions.

License

You can use this connector for a 30-day trial period without a license key.

After 30 days, this connector is available under a Confluent enterprise license. Confluent issues enterprise license keys to subscribers, along with providing enterprise-level support for Confluent Platform and your connectors. If you are a subscriber, please contact Confluent Support at support@confluent.io for more information.

See Confluent Platform license for license properties and License topic configuration for information about the license topic.

Quick Start

  1. Install the connector:

    confluent-hub install confluentinc/kafka-connect-syslog:latest

  2. Start Confluent Platform:

    |confluent_start| connect

  3. Create a config file with the following contents:

    name=syslog-tcp
tasks.max=1
connector.class=io.confluent.connect.syslog.SyslogSourceConnector
syslog.port=5454
syslog.listener=TCP
confluent.topic.bootstrap.servers=localhost:9092

  4. Load the Syslog Connector.

    confluent load syslog-tcp​ -d path/to/config.properties

    Important

    Don’t use the Confluent CLI in production environments. Always run the Syslog connector in standalone mode, for example, with bin/connect-standalone.

  5. Test with sample syslog-formatted message sent via netcat:

    echo "<34>1 2003-10-11T22:14:15.003Z mymachine.example.com su - ID47 - Your refrigerator is running" | nc -v -w 0 localhost 5454

  6. Confirm that the message is logged to Kafka:

    kafka-avro-console-consumer \
    --bootstrap-server localhost:9092 \
    --property schema.registry.url=http://localhost:8081 \
    --topic syslog --from-beginning | jq '.'

Additional Documentation