= Mercury

== What is Mercury ?

Mercury is a syslog forwarder.

== Why another one ?

the main goals are :

• providing isolation between sources, and between destinations
• providing loading/unloading conf without restart
• providing FIFO support for software with file-only logging
• outputing only rfc5424 message
• if you use a log aggregator, all the filters and complex-dispatching will run on the aggregator not the source host
• if you have lots of vms, containers, jails, chroot, you may need a lightweight forwarder

== configuration

=== rules

1. Each configuration block is a specific file.
2. Each configuration block is a json serialization in a file.
3. There is two kinds of drivers : input driver and output driver
4. The only globally mandatories keys are : "id" and "driver"
5. The key "id" is the name of a configuration block
6. The key "driver" is the used driver for a configuration block
7. An instance is a configuration block with an id and a driver
8. An output instance is a configuration block with an id and a driver using an output driver
9. The key "output" is mandatory for input drivers
10. The key "output" is a list of "id" of output instance

=== i_devlog driver

• type : input driver
• arguments :
  • socket
    • optional
    • default : "/dev/log"
    • meaning : the name of the datagram unix socket to listen to

=== i_krnlog driver

• type : input driver
• arguments :
  • none

=== i_devlog driver

• type : input driver
• arguments :
  • tick
    • optional
    • default : "300"
    • meaning : seconds between two health report about mercury

=== i_fifo driver

• type : input driver
  • arguments :
  • file
    • mandatory
    • meaning : name of the local file where the log are stored
  • appname
    • mandatory
    • meaning : application name of any new message
  • priority
    • mandatory
    • meaning : "facility.level" of any new message

=== i_tailfile driver

• type : input driver
• arguments :
  • file
    • mandatory
    • meaning : name of the local file where the log are stored
  • appname
    • mandatory
    • meaning : application name of any new message
  • priority
    • mandatory
    • meaning : "facility.level" of any new message

=== o_appendfile driver

• type : input driver
• arguments :
  • file
    • mandatory
    • meaning : name of the local file where the log are stored

=== o_tcp5424 driver

• type : input driver
• arguments :
  • host
    • mandatory
    • meaning : "hostname:port" of the destination

=== o_tls5424 driver

• type : input driver
• arguments :
  • host
    • mandatory
    • meaning : "hostname:port" of the destination