Status of Nginx centralised logging

[Jonathan Matthews]

Hi all -

As many of us will have discovered over the course of our careers,
centralised/non-local logging is an important part of any non-trivial
infrastructure.

I'm aware of different patches that add syslogging capabilities to
different Nginx versions, but I've yet to see an official description
of how we should achieve non-local logging. Preferably syslog,
personally speaking, but anything scalable, supportable, debug-able
and sane would, I feel, be acceptable to the wider community.

I'm aware of at least the following options, but I feel they're all
lacking to some degree:

* log to local disk and syslog/logstash/rsync them off: undesirable
due to the management overhead of the additional logging process/logic
+ the wasted disk I/O when creating the per-request logs

* use post_action to hit a logging endpoint after each request: would
add overhead to both configuration and network traffic; post_action
has been described as "a bit of a hack", IIRC

* use syslog patches: not "official", hence troublesome to debug
on-list; rightly or wrongly, the usual response of "please replicate
problem without 3rd party patches" would cause problems when debugging
production systems

* use another 3rd-party logging protocol, e.g. statsd, redis: as
similarly unsupportable as syslog patches

I wonder if someone could officially comment on the potential for
resolving this gap in Nginx's feature set? Or perhaps I'm missing
something ... :-)

Many thanks, all
Jonathan
-- 
Jonathan Matthews
Oxford, London, UK
http://www.jpluscplusm.com/contact.html