# Actions

The Action object describe what is to be done with a message. They are implemented via output modules.

The action object has different parameters:

- those that apply to all actions and are action specific. These are documented below.

- parameters for the action queue. While they also apply to all parameters, they are queue-specific, not action-specific (they are the same that are used in rulesets, for example). The are documented separately under queue parameters.

- action-specific parameters. These are specific to a certain type of actions. They are documented by the output modules in question.

## General Action Parameters

Note: parameter names are case-insensitive.

- name word

  This names the action. The name is used for statistics gathering and documentation. If no name is given, one is dynamically generated based on the occurrence of this action inside the rsyslog configuration. Actions are sequentially numbered from 1 to n.

- type string

  Mandatory parameter for every action. The name of the module that should be used.

- action.writeAllMarkMessages on/off

  This setting tells if mark messages are always written (“on”, the default) or only if the action was not recently executed (“off”). By default, recently means within the past 20 minutes. If this setting is “on”, mark messages are always sent to actions, no matter how recently they have been executed. In this mode, mark messages can be used as a kind of heartbeat. This mode also enables faster processing inside the rule engine. So it should be set to “off” only when there is a good reason to do so.

- action.execOnlyEveryNthTime integer

  If configured, the next action will only be executed every n-th time. For example, if configured to 3, the first two messages that go into the action will be dropped, the 3rd will actually cause the action to execute, the 4th and 5th will be dropped, the 6th executed under the action, … and so on.

- action.execOnlyEveryNthTimeout integer

  Has a meaning only if Action.ExecOnlyEveryNthTime is also configured for the same action. If so, the timeout setting specifies after which period the counting of “previous actions” expires and a new action count is begun. Specify 0 (the default) to disable timeouts. Why is this option needed? Consider this case: a message comes in at, eg., 10am. That’s count 1. Then, nothing happens for the next 10 hours. At 8pm, the next one occurs. That’s count 2. Another 5 hours later, the next message occurs, bringing the total count to 3. Thus, this message now triggers the rule. The question is if this is desired behavior? Or should the rule only be triggered if the messages occur within an e.g. 20 minute window? If the later is the case, you need a Action.ExecOnlyEveryNthTimeTimeout=”1200” This directive will timeout previous messages seen if they are older than 20 minutes. In the example above, the count would now be always 1 and consequently no rule would ever be triggered.

- action.errorfile string

  New in version 8.32.0.

  When an action is executed, some messages may permanently fail. Depending on configuration, this could for example be caused by an offline target or exceptionally non-numerical data inside a numerical database field. If action.errorfile is specified, those messages are written to the specified file. If it is not specified (the default), messages are silently discarded.

  The error file format is JSON. It contains the failed messages as provided to the action in question, the action name as well as the rsyslog status code roughly explaining why it failed.

- action.execOnlyOnceEveryInterval integer

  Execute action only if the last execute is at last seconds in the past (more info in ommail, but may be used with any action)

- action.execOnlyWhenPreviousIsSuspended on/off

  This directive allows to specify if actions should always be executed (“off,” the default) or only if the previous action is suspended (“on”). This directive works hand-in-hand with the multiple actions per selector feature. It can be used, for example, to create rules that automatically switch destination servers or databases to a (set of) backup(s), if the primary server fails. Note that this feature depends on proper implementation of the suspend feature in the output module. All built-in output modules properly support it (most importantly the database write and the syslog message forwarder). Note, however, that a failed action may not immediately be detected. For more information, see the rsyslog execOnlyWhenPreviousIsSpuspended preciseness FAQ article.

- action.repeatedmsgcontainsoriginalmsg on/off

  “last message repeated n times” messages, if generated, have a different format that contains the message that is being repeated. Note that only the first “n” characters are included, with n to be at least 80 characters, most probably more (this may change from version to version, thus no specific limit is given). The bottom line is that n is large enough to get a good idea which message was repeated but it is not necessarily large enough for the whole message. (Introduced with 4.1.5).

- action.resumeRetryCount integer

  [default 0, -1 means eternal]

  Sets how often an action is retried before it is considered to have failed. Failed actions discard messages.

- action.resumeInterval integer

  Sets the action’s resume interval. The interval provided is always in seconds. Thus, multiply by 60 if you need minutes and 3,600 if you need hours (not recommended). When an action is suspended (e.g. destination can not be connected), the action is resumed for the configured interval. Thereafter, it is retried. If multiple retries fail, the interval is automatically extended. This is to prevent excessive resource use for retries. After each 10 retries, the interval is extended by itself. To be precise, the actual interval is (numRetries / 10 + 1) * action.resumeInterval. Using the default value of 30, this means that on the 10th try the suspension interval will be 60 (seconds) and after the 100th try it will be 330 (seconds).

- action.resumeIntervalMax integer

  Default: 1800 (30 minutes)

  This sets an upper limit on the growth of action.resumeInterval. No wait will be larger than the value configured here. Going higher than the default is only recommended if you know that a system may be offline for an extended period of time and if it is acceptable that it may take quite long to detect it came online again.

- action.reportSuspension on/off

  Configures rsyslog to report suspension and reactivation of the action. This is useful to note which actions have problems (e.g. connecting to a remote system) and when. The default for this setting is the equally-named global parameter.

- action.reportSuspensionContinuation on/off

  Configures rsyslog to report continuation of action suspension. This emits new messages whenever an action is to be retried, but continues to fail. If set to “on”, action.reportSuspension is also automatically set to “on”. The default for this setting is the equally-named global parameter.

- action.copyMsg on/off

  Configures action to copy the message if on. Defaults to off (which is how actions have worked traditionally), which causes queue to refer to the original message object, with reference-counting. (Introduced with 8.10.0).

## Useful Links

- Rainer’s blog posting on the performance of main and action queue worker threads

## Legacy Format

Be warned that legacy action format is hard to get right. It is recommended to use RainerScript-Style action format whenever possible! A key problem with legacy format is that a single action is defined via multiple configurations lines, which may be spread all across rsyslog.conf. Even the definition of multiple actions may be intermixed (often not intentional!). If legacy actions format needs to be used (e.g. some modules may not yet implement the RainerScript format), it is strongly recommended to place all configuration statements pertaining to a single action closely together.

Please also note that legacy action parameters do not affect RainerScript action objects. So if you define for example:

    $actionResumeRetryCount 10
    action(type="omfwd" target="server1.example.net")
    @@server2.example.net

server1’s “action.resumeRetryCount” parameter is not set, instead server2’s is!

A goal of the new RainerScript action format was to avoid confusion which parameters are actually used. As such, it would be counter-productive to honor legacy action parameters inside a RainerScript definition. As result, both types of action definitions are strictly (and nicely) separated from each other. The bottom line is that if RainerScript actions are used, one does not need to care about which legacy action parameters may (still…) be in effect.

Note that not all modules necessarily support legacy action format. Especially newer modules are recommended to NOT support it.

### Legacy Description

Templates can be used with many actions. If used, the specified template is used to generate the message content (instead of the default template). To specify a template, write a semicolon after the action value immediately followed by the template name. Beware: templates MUST be defined BEFORE they are used. It is OK to define some templates, then use them in selector lines, define more templates and use use them in the following selector lines. But it is NOT permitted to use a template in a selector line that is above its definition. If you do this, the action will be ignored.

You can have multiple actions for a single selector (or more precisely a single filter of such a selector line). Each action must be on its own line and the line must start with an ampersand (‘&’) character and have no filters. An example would be

    *.=crit :omusrmsg:rger
    & root
    & /var/log/critmsgs

These three lines send critical messages to the user rger and root and also store them in /var/log/critmsgs. Using multiple actions per selector is convenient and also offers a performance benefit. As the filter needs to be evaluated only once, there is less computation required to process the directive compared to the otherwise-equal config directives below:

    *.=crit :omusrmsg:rger
    *.=crit root
    *.=crit /var/log/critmsgs

### Regular File

Typically messages are logged to real files. The file usually is specified by full pathname, beginning with a slash “/”. Starting with version 4.6.2 and 5.4.1 (previous v5 version do NOT support this) relative file names can also be specified. To do so, these must begin with a dot. For example, use “./file-in-current-dir.log” to specify a file in the current directory. Please note that rsyslogd usually changes its working directory to the root, so relative file names must be tested with care (they were introduced primarily as a debugging vehicle, but may have useful other applications as well). You may prefix each entry with the minus “-‘’ sign to omit syncing the file after every logging. Note that you might lose information if the system crashes right behind a write attempt. Nevertheless this might give you back some performance, especially if you run programs that use logging in a very verbose manner.

If your system is connected to a reliable UPS and you receive lots of log data (e.g. firewall logs), it might be a very good idea to turn of syncing by specifying the “-” in front of the file name.

The filename can be either static(always the same) or dynamic (different based on message received). The later is useful if you would automatically split messages into different files based on some message criteria. For example, dynamic file name selectors allow you to split messages into different files based on the host that sent them. With dynamic file names, everything is automatic and you do not need any filters.

It works via the template system. First, you define a template for the file name. An example can be seen above in the description of template. We will use the “DynFile” template defined there. Dynamic filenames are indicated by specifying a questions mark “?” instead of a slash, followed by the template name. Thus, the selector line for our dynamic file name would look as follows:

> `*.* ?DynFile`

That’s all you need to do. Rsyslog will now automatically generate file names for you and store the right messages into the right files. Please note that the minus sign also works with dynamic file name selectors. Thus, to avoid syncing, you may use

> `*.* -?DynFile`

And of course you can use templates to specify the output format:

> `*.* ?DynFile;MyTemplate`

A word of caution: rsyslog creates files as needed. So if a new host is using your syslog server, rsyslog will automatically create a new file for it.

Creating directories is also supported. For example you can use the hostname as directory and the program name as file name:

> `$template DynFile,"/var/log/%HOSTNAME%/%programname%.log"`

### Named Pipes

This version of rsyslogd(8) has support for logging output to named pipes (fifos). A fifo or named pipe can be used as a destination for log messages by prepending a pipe symbol (“|’’) to the name of the file. This is handy for debugging. Note that the fifo must be created with the mkfifo(1) command before rsyslogd(8) is started.

### Terminal and Console

If the file you specified is a tty, special tty-handling is done, same with /dev/console.

### Remote Machine

Rsyslogd provides full remote logging, i.e. is able to send messages to a remote host running rsyslogd(8) and to receive messages from remote hosts. Using this feature you’re able to control all syslog messages on one host, if all other machines will log remotely to that. This tears down administration needs.

To forward messages to another host, prepend the hostname with the at sign (“@”). A single at sign means that messages will be forwarded via UDP protocol (the standard for syslog). If you prepend two at signs (“@@”), the messages will be transmitted via TCP. Please note that plain TCP based syslog is not officially standardized, but most major syslogds support it (e.g. syslog-ng or WinSyslog). The forwarding action indicator (at-sign) can be followed by one or more options. If they are given, they must be immediately (without a space) following the final at sign and be enclosed in parenthesis. The individual options must be separated by commas. The following options are right now defined:

z<number>

Enable zlib-compression for the message. The <number> is the compression level. It can be 1 (lowest gain, lowest CPU overhead) to 9 (maximum compression, highest CPU overhead). The level can also be 0, which means “no compression”. If given, the “z” option is ignored. So this does not make an awful lot of sense. There is hardly a difference between level 1 and 9 for typical syslog messages. You can expect a compression gain between 0% and 30% for typical messages. Very chatty messages may compress up to 50%, but this is seldom seen with typically traffic. Please note that rsyslogd checks the compression gain. Messages with 60 bytes or less will never be compressed. This is because compression gain is pretty unlikely and we prefer to save CPU cycles. Messages over that size are always compressed. However, it is checked if there is a gain in compression and only if there is, the compressed message is transmitted. Otherwise, the uncompressed messages is transmitted. This saves the receiver CPU cycles for decompression. It also prevents small message to actually become larger in compressed form.

Please note that when a TCP transport is used, compression will also turn on syslog-transport-tls framing. See the “o” option for important information on the implications.

Compressed messages are automatically detected and decompressed by the receiver. There is nothing that needs to be configured on the receiver side.

o

This option is experimental. Use at your own risk and only if you know why you need it! If in doubt, do NOT turn it on.

This option is only valid for plain TCP based transports. It selects a different framing based on IETF internet draft syslog-transport-tls-06. This framing offers some benefits over traditional LF-based framing. However, the standardization effort is not yet complete. There may be changes in upcoming versions of this standard. Rsyslog will be kept in line with the standard. There is some chance that upcoming changes will be incompatible to the current specification. In this case, all systems using -transport-tls framing must be upgraded. There will be no effort made to retain compatibility between different versions of rsyslog. The primary reason for that is that it seems technically impossible to provide compatibility between some of those changes. So you should take this note very serious. It is not something we do not *like* to do (and may change our mind if enough people beg…), it is something we most probably *can not* do for technical reasons (aka: you can beg as much as you like, it won’t change anything…).

The most important implication is that compressed syslog messages via TCP must be considered with care. Unfortunately, it is technically impossible to transfer compressed records over traditional syslog plain tcp transports, so you are left with two evil choices…

> The hostname may be followed by a colon and the destination port.

The following is an example selector line with forwarding:

*.* @@(o,z9)192.168.0.1:1470

In this example, messages are forwarded via plain TCP with experimental framing and maximum compression to the host 192.168.0.1 at port 1470.

*.* @192.168.0.1

In the example above, messages are forwarded via UDP to the machine 192.168.0.1, the destination port defaults to 514. Messages will not be compressed.

Note that IPv6 addresses contain colons. So if an IPv6 address is specified in the hostname part, rsyslogd could not detect where the IP address ends and where the port starts. There is a syntax extension to support this: put square brackets around the address (e.g. “[2001::1]”). Square brackets also work with real host names and IPv4 addresses, too.

A valid sample to send messages to the IPv6 host 2001::1 at port 515 is as follows:

*.* @[2001::1]:515

This works with TCP, too.

Note to sysklogd users: sysklogd does not support RFC 3164 format, which is the default forwarding template in rsyslog. As such, you will experience duplicate hostnames if rsyslog is the sender and sysklogd is the receiver. The fix is simple: you need to use a different template. Use that one:

$template sysklogd,”<%PRI%>%TIMESTAMP% %syslogtag%%msg%\””

  *.* @192.168.0.1;sysklogd

### List of Users

Usually critical messages are also directed to “root’’ on that machine. You can specify a list of users that shall get the message by simply writing “:omusrmsg: followed by the login name. For example, the send messages to root, use “:omusrmsg:root”. You may specify more than one user by separating them with commas (“,’’). Do not repeat the “:omusrmsg:” prefix in this case. For example, to send data to users root and rger, use “:omusrmsg:root,rger” (do not use “:omusrmsg:root,:omusrmsg:rger”, this is invalid). If they’re logged in they get the message.

### Everyone logged on

Emergency messages often go to all users currently online to notify them that something strange is happening with the system. To specify this wall(1)-feature use an asterisk as the user message destination(“:omusrmsg:*’’).

### Call Plugin

This is a generic way to call an output plugin. The plugin must support this functionality. Actual parameters depend on the module, so see the module’s doc on what to supply. The general syntax is as follows:

:modname:params;template

Currently, the ommysql database output module supports this syntax (in addition to the “>” syntax it traditionally supported). For ommysql, the module name is “ommysql” and the params are the traditional ones. The ;template part is not module specific, it is generic rsyslog functionality available to all modules.

As an example, the ommysql module may be called as follows:

:ommysql:dbhost,dbname,dbuser,dbpassword;dbtemplate

For details, please see the “Database Table” section of this documentation.

Note: as of this writing, the “:modname:” part is hardcoded into the module. So the name to use is not necessarily the name the module’s plugin file is called.

### Database Table

This allows logging of the message to a database table. Currently, only MySQL databases are supported. However, other database drivers will most probably be developed as plugins. By default, a MonitorWare-compatible schema is required for this to work. You can create that schema with the createDB.SQL file that came with the rsyslog package. You can also use any other schema of your liking - you just need to define a proper template and assign this template to the action. The database writer is called by specifying a greater-then sign (“>”) in front of the database connect information. Immediately after that sign the database host name must be given, a comma, the database name, another comma, the database user, a comma and then the user’s password. If a specific template is to be used, a semicolon followed by the template name can follow the connect information. This is as follows: >dbhost,dbname,dbuser,dbpassword;dbtemplate

Important: to use the database functionality, the MySQL output module must be loaded in the config file BEFORE the first database table action is used. This is done by placing the

    $ModLoad ommysql

directive some place above the first use of the database write (we recommend doing at the beginning of the config file).

### Discard / Stop

If the discard action is carried out, the received message is immediately discarded. No further processing of it occurs. Discard has primarily been added to filter out messages before carrying on any further processing. For obvious reasons, the results of “discard” are depending on where in the configuration file it is being used. Please note that once a message has been discarded there is no way to retrieve it in later configuration file lines.

Discard can be highly effective if you want to filter out some annoying messages that otherwise would fill your log files. To do that, place the discard actions early in your log files. This often plays well with property-based filters, giving you great freedom in specifying what you do not want.

Discard is just the word “stop” with no further parameters:

stop

For example,

*.* stop

discards everything (ok, you can achieve the same by not running rsyslogd at all…).

Note that in legacy configuration the tilde character “~” can also be used instead of the word “stop”.

### Output Channel

Binds an output channel definition (see there for details) to this action. Output channel actions must start with a $-sign, e.g. if you would like to bind your output channel definition “mychannel” to the action, use “$mychannel”. Output channels support template definitions like all all other actions.

### Shell Execute

NOTE: This action is only supported for backwards compatibility. For new configs, use omprog instead. It provides a more solid and secure solution with higher performance.

This executes a program in a subshell. The program is passed the template-generated message as the only command line parameter. Rsyslog waits until the program terminates and only then continues to run.

^program-to-execute;template

The program-to-execute can be any valid executable. It receives the template string as a single parameter (argv[1]).

WARNING: The Shell Execute action was added to serve an urgent need. While it is considered reasonable save when used with some thinking, its implications must be considered. The current implementation uses a system() call to execute the command. This is not the best way to do it (and will hopefully changed in further releases). Also, proper escaping of special characters is done to prevent command injection. However, attackers always find smart ways to circumvent escaping, so we can not say if the escaping applied will really safe you from all hassles. Lastly, rsyslog will wait until the shell command terminates. Thus, a program error in it (e.g. an infinite loop) can actually disable rsyslog. Even without that, during the programs run-time no messages are processed by rsyslog. As the IP stacks buffers are quickly overflowed, this bears an increased risk of message loss. You must be aware of these implications. Even though they are severe, there are several cases where the “shell execute” action is very useful. This is the reason why we have included it in its current form. To mitigate its risks, always a) test your program thoroughly, b) make sure its runtime is as short as possible (if it requires a longer run-time, you might want to spawn your own sub-shell asynchronously), c) apply proper firewalling so that only known senders can send syslog messages to rsyslog. Point c) is especially important: if rsyslog is accepting message from any hosts, chances are much higher that an attacker might try to exploit the “shell execute” action.

### Template Name

Every ACTION can be followed by a template name. If so, that template is used for message formatting. If no name is given, a hard-coded default template is used for the action. There can only be one template name for each given action. The default template is specific to each action. For a description of what a template is and what you can do with it, see the template documentation.

See also

Help with configuring/using `Rsyslog`:

- Mailing list - best route for general questions

- GitHub: rsyslog source project - detailed questions, reporting issues that are believed to be bugs with `Rsyslog`

- Stack Exchange (View, Ask) - experimental support from rsyslog community

See also

Contributing to `Rsyslog`:

- Source project: rsyslog project README.

- Documentation: rsyslog-doc project README

Copyright 2008-2020 Rainer Gerhards (Großrinderfeld), and Others.