alt Hacker NewsOn the other hand, traditional syslog is UDP based, so as soon as the receiver experiences CPU or I/O starvation and its receive buffer overflows, it will begin dropping messages. That's not great for observability, and may well be impermissible at many sites that need end-to-end log integrity (e.g. audit logs).
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cheaply dropping log msgs you cannot handle is absolutely essential for an observability system - otherwise excess load can take down the logging infra which can (if msgs aren't dropped) take down the prod network/app trying to send reliable log msgs.
Audit logs are a distinct feature.
You can use TCP and other mechanisms for guaranteed delivery. Like, almost all LIDR logging across the planet uses TCP syslog, which is durable and attestable to in courts.
Thirty years ago and more that might have been a valid objection, but at that time the alternatives weren't great either. No one has suggested running syslog over unreliable transport after that.
In fact, the queue management and at least the possibility of some rudimentary end-to-end cryptographic integrity checks are some of the stronger points of rsyslog. Splunk Cloud and Elastic, as far as I know, lacks the latter completely which rules them out as a single log sink for environments with that type of requirements.