For detailed look at the goals, design, and implementation of this project, check out this blog post.

Ekanite is a syslog server with built-in search. Its goal is to do one thing, and do it well -- make log messages received over the network searchable. What it lacks in feature, it makes up for in focus. Built in Go, it has no external dependencies, which makes deployment easy.

Features include:

• Supports reception of log messages over UDP, TCP, and TCP with TLS.
• Full text search of all received log messages.
• Full parsing of RFC5424 headers.
• Log messages are indexed by parsed timestamp, if one is available. This means search results are presented in the order the messages occurred, not in the order they were received, ensuring sensible display even with delayed senders.
• Automatic data-retention management. Ekanite deletes indexed log data older than a configurable time period.
• Not a JVM in sight.

Search is implemented using the bleve search library. For some performance analysis of bleve, and of the sharding techniques used by Ekanite, check out this post.

Tested on 64-bit Kubuntu 14.04.

mkdir ~/ekanite # Or a directory of your choice.
cd ~/ekanite
export GOPATH=$PWD
go get github.com/ekanite/ekanite
go install github.com/ekanite/...

The daemon will be located in the $GOPATH/bin directory. Execute

$ ekanited -h
    ekanite [options]
    -batchsize=300: Indexing batch size.
    -batchtime=1000: Indexing batch timeout, in milliseconds.
    -datadir="/var/opt/ekanite": Set data directory.
    -diag="": expvar and pprof bind address in the form host:port. If not set, not started.
    -maxpending=1000: Maximum pending index events.
    -noreport=false: Do not report anonymous data on launch.
    -numshards=16: Set number of shards per index.
    -query="localhost:9950": TCP Bind address for query server in the form host:port.
    -retention="168h": Data retention period. Minimum is 24 hours.
    -tcp="": Syslog server TCP bind address in the form host:port. If not set, not started.
    -udp="": Syslog server UDP bind address in the form host:port. If not set, not started.

for command-line options.

For now, for Ekanite to accept logs, your syslog client must be configured such that the log lines are RFC5424 compliant, and in the following format:

<PRI>VERSION TIMESTAMP HOSTNAME APP-NAME PROC-ID MSGID MSG"

Consult the RFC to learn what each of these fields is. The TIMESTAMP field must be in RFC3339 format. Both rsyslog and syslog-ng support templating, which make it very easy for those programs to format logs correctly and transmit the logs to Ekanite. Templates and installation instructions for both systems are below.

rsyslog

# Send messages to Ekanite over TCP using the template. Assumes Ekanite is listening on 127.0.0.1:5514
$template Ekanite,"<%pri%>%protocol-version% %timestamp:::date-rfc3339% %HOSTNAME% %app-name% %procid% - %msg%"
*.*             @@127.0.0.1:5514;EkaniteFormat

Add this template to /etc/rsyslog.d/23-ekanite.conf and then restart rsyslog using the command sudo service rsyslog restart.

syslog-ng

source s_ekanite {
	system();	# Check which OS & collect system logs
	internal();	# Collect syslog-ng logs
};
template Ekanite { template("<${PRI}>1 ${ISODATE} ${HOST} ${PROGRAM} ${PID} - $MSG"); template_escape(no) };
destination d_ekanite {
	tcp("127.0.0.1" port(5514) template(Ekanite));
};

log { 
	source(s_ekanite); 
	destination(d_ekanite); 
};

Add this template to /etc/syslog-ng/syslog-ng.conf and then restart syslog-ng using the command /etc/init.d/syslog-ng restart.

With these changes in place rsyslog or syslog-ng will continue to send logs to any existing destination, and also forward the logs to Ekanite.

Search support is pretty simple at the moment. Telnet to the query server (see the command line options) and enter a search term. The query language supported is the simple language supported by bleve, but a more sophisiticated query syntax, including searching for specific field values, may be supported soon.

For example, below is an example search session, showing accesses to the login URL of a Wordpress site. The telnet clients connects to the query server and enters the string login

$ telnet 127.0.0.1 9950
Trying 127.0.0.1...
Connected to 127.0.0.1.
Escape character is '^]'.
login
<134>0 2015-05-05T23:50:17.025568+00:00 fisher apache-access - - 65.98.59.154 - - [05/May/2015:23:50:12 +0000] "GET /wp-login.php HTTP/1.0" 200 206 "-" "-"
<134>0 2015-05-06T01:24:41.232890+00:00 fisher apache-access - - 104.140.83.221 - - [06/May/2015:01:24:40 +0000] "GET /wp-login.php?action=register HTTP/1.0" 200 206 "http://www.philipotoole.com/" "Opera/9.80 (Windows NT 6.2; Win64; x64) Presto/2.12.388 Version/12.17"
<134>0 2015-05-06T01:24:41.232895+00:00 fisher apache-access - - 104.140.83.221 - - [06/May/2015:01:24:40 +0000] "GET /wp-login.php?action=register HTTP/1.1" 200 243 "http://www.philipotoole.com/wp-login.php?action=register" "Opera/9.80 (Windows NT 6.2; Win64; x64) Presto/2.12.388 Version/12.17"
<134>0 2015-05-06T02:47:54.612953+00:00 fisher apache-access - - 184.68.20.22 - - [06/May/2015:02:47:51 +0000] "GET /wp-login.php HTTP/1.1" 200 243 "-" "Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 6.1) AppleWebKit/537.1 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/24.0.1309.0 Safari/537.17"
<134>0 2015-05-06T04:20:49.008609+00:00 fisher apache-access - - 193.104.41.186 - - [06/May/2015:04:20:46 +0000] "POST /wp-login.php HTTP/1.1" 200 206 "-" "Opera 10.00"

Perhaps you only want to search for POST accesses to that URL:

login -GET
<134>0 2015-05-06T04:20:49.008609+00:00 fisher apache-access - - 193.104.41.186 - - [06/May/2015:04:20:46 +0000] "POST /wp-login.php HTTP/1.1" 200 206 "-" "Opera 10.00"

A more sophisticated client program is planned.

Basic statistics and diagnostics are available. Visit http://localhost:9951/debug/vars to retrieve this information. The host and port can be changed via the -diag command-line option.

Ekanite reports a small amount anonymous data to Loggly, each time it is launched. This data is just the host operating system and system architecture and is only used to track the number of Ekanite deployments. Reporting can be disabled by passing -noreport=true to Ekanite at launch time.

The project is actively developed and is early stage software -- contributions in the form of bug reports and pull requests are welcome. Much work remains around performance and scaling.