rsyslog also supports structured RFC5424 messages. Others will support it in time. I agree it's not the most perfect format, but it's usable, and already much

rsyslog also supports structured RFC5424 messages. Others will support it in time. I agree it's not the most perfect format, but it's usable, and already much better than freeform text messages if you intend to do programmatic processing. Another interesting initiative in normalized logging is CEE (http://cee.mitre.org/ http://cee.mitre.org/). The 'lognorm' and 'libee' libraries (http://www.liblognorm.com/ http://www.liblognorm.com/) are early attempts to implement this. Note that I haven't looked at 'gelf' yet so I don't know how it compares.