Understanding the pros and cons of rsyslog
Fedora was the first Linux distro to come with rsyslog as its default logging system, way back in 2007. It has quite a few improvements over the old syslog, and it eventually replaced syslog as the standard logging system on Linux, Unix, and Unix-like operating systems. Despite now having journald, rsyslog is still with us, as we'll see in just a bit.
One of the best features of rsyslog is also its biggest weakness. That is, it stores log files in plaintext format. That's great in a way because you can use your normal text search and viewing utilities to view the log files and find whatever information that you need to find. The less, head, tail, awk, and grep utilities are your friends when it comes to working with these plaintext log files. This also makes it very easy to write shell scripts to extract and parse information automatically.
But there are a few problems with using plaintext log files. The first one is that plaintext...