There's been a lot of noise about logging in the linux ecosystem lately. There's Project Lumberjack (http://bazsi.blogs.balabit.com/2012/02/project-lumberjack-

There's been a lot of noise about logging in the linux ecosystem lately. There's Project Lumberjack (http://bazsi.blogs.balabit.com/2012/02/project-lumberjack-to-improve-linux-logging/ http://bazsi.blogs.balabit.com/2012/02/project-lumberjack-to...) to encourage applications to generate structured logs and better document/integrate tools for working with those logs. The proposed structure is Common Event Expression (http://cee.mitre.org/ http://cee.mitre.org/). At the last kernel summit, ideas (http://lwn.net/Articles/492125/ http://lwn.net/Articles/492125/) were presented on how to make kernel messages more structured. More radically, there's The Journal (http://lwn.net/Articles/468049/ http://lwn.net/Articles/468049/), a proposed replacement for syslog.