Just my 2 cents here:
a lot earlier I came with a proposal go give a REST API that would
basically enable external applications to get messages from a rsyslog queue:
http://bugzilla.adiscon.com/show_bug.cgi?id=482

With omrest, one should be able to use any programming language to pull
messages from rsyslog. For example, one could write a Kafka publisher (in
any language) that would pull messages from rsyslog and publish to Kafka.

I assume this is better than omprog because AFAIK with omprog piping to the
STDIN of a binary there's a tiny OS buffer (a pipe or something? this is
iffy territory for me) that may get full and you may lose messages if the
other app isn't fast enough. That, or you need to implement queues in your
external program. Which is duplicate work, queues are already in rsyslog.
With omrest (hypothetically), if you need more performance, you just need
to spawn more threads/processes to pull from the queue and push wherever.
Assuming you have the hardware.

On the input side, one can already write connectors in any language. Just
make the thing push to any input rsyslog supports. For most use-cases,
rsyslog should pull from that input fast enough to avoid any issues.

Now the only problem with omrest is that it needs to be implemented :)
Which bumps into the 24h problem of people [who can actually do it].

Best regards,
Radu

2013/12/15 Otis Gospodnetic <otis.gospodne...@gmail.com>

> Hi,
>
> Thanks for the info.
> I was asking because having the ability to write ims and oms in different
> languages would open a lot of opportunities.  This is one of those
> "enablement" things.  I understand writing modules in other languages may
> mean those using such modules may hurt performance, but some people need
> certain functionality more than performance.
>
> Take omkafka example from the other day.  If there were a way to write an
> om in Java it's be trivial for a lot of Java developers out there to
> contribute omkafka.
>
> If omprog enables development of the ecosystem, it sounds like something to
> point out clearly somewhere and nurture that a bit.  I do see
> http://www.rsyslog.com/doc/omprog.html because somebody shared a link, but
> I don't see that on http://www.rsyslog.com/doc or on
> http://www.rsyslog.com/doc/dev_oplugins.html or in the new README.
>
> Coincidentally, I just came across Fluentd's instructions for writing
> plugins, which could serve as guidance:
> http://docs.fluentd.org/articles/plugin-development .  Nice, clean, well
> structured, not a lot of prose...
>
> Otis
> --
> Performance Monitoring * Log Analytics * Search Analytics
> Solr & Elasticsearch Support * http://sematext.com/
>
>
> On Sat, Dec 14, 2013 at 1:39 PM, David Lang <da...@lang.hm> wrote:
>
> > On Sat, 14 Dec 2013, RB wrote:
> >
> >  On Sat, Dec 14, 2013 at 5:24 AM, Rainer Gerhards
> >> <rgerha...@hq.adiscon.com> wrote:
> >>
> >>> well, technically it's for sure possible, it's just another of these
> 24h
> >>> things. Technically, it's a question of interface, and insofar of which
> >>> types of modules. Obviously, these will be slower, and how slow is
> >>> another
> >>> interface/effort question.
> >>>
> >>> Thinking about this, one could probably also claim the answer is "yes,
> >>> you
> >>> can write OUTPUT modules in any language", it's just a doc issue. In
> >>> fact,
> >>> omprog can be used as an interface here. It's actually not even a bad
> >>> interface...
> >>>
> >>> Again, something learned ;)
> >>>
> >>
> >> Probably the cheapest (implementation) "binding" for rsyslog would be
> >> a system() like call.  Execute the subprogram with /bin/sh -c and
> >> communicate with structured messages on STDIO.
> >>
> >
> > a real module binding would be far more complex. It would allow the
> module
> > (in whatever language) access to the rsyslog queues and other data
> > structures. This is possible, but not easy by any means.
> >
> > One big problem is that currently rsyslog does all this work in a
> threaded
> > environment. It may make sense in v9 or v10 to shift from a default
> > shared-everything threading model to a explicit shared memory
> multiprocess
> > model. At that point having one of the processes use a different language
> > would not be that hard.
> >
> > But in the current threaded model, having one thread run a different
> > language would be very, very hard.
> >
> > The other issue here is performance. Rsyslog goes to a LOT of effort to
> be
> > fast. Some of the things that have made very noticable diffences in
> > performance in rsyslog are things that seem like they should be very
> minor.
> > Think about these things and then think about what would be involved to
> > define interfaces in a multi-language safe way.
> >
> > things that have resulted in noticable speedups have been:
> >
> > removing gettimeofday() calls.
> >
> >   it used to be that rsyslog recorded when a message arrived, when it was
> > put on the main queue, when it was moved to an action queue, when it was
> > pulled from the action queue, and when it was delivered
> >
> >   now, high performance users configure rsyslog so that it only does one
> > gettimeofday() call per hundred (ot thousand) messages that arrive and
> use
> > that one time for every message
> >
> > string modules
> >
> >   it used to be that the default template (<%pri%>%timestamp% %hostname%
> > %syslogtag%%msg%) was interpreted by the rsyslog engine for every message
> > that was output
> >
> >   now string modules written in C create these strings rather than
> > interpreting the template. This resulted in a double-digit % performance
> > improvement
> >
> > With optimizations like these in use, changing things to allow for a
> > module written in a different language to have access to the rsyslog
> > internals as would be needed for a high-performance interface seems like
> it
> > will probably end up hurting the rsyslog performance overall.
> >
> >
> > That being said, I am very much in favor of multi-process with explicit
> > sharing rather than multi-threaded with implicit sharing, but getting all
> > the interfaces correct and fast would be a VERY hard task.
> >
> > David Lang
> >
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