Chris Read

It’s been way too long since I’ve posted anything here, so I’ve decided to resume again with what I’ve been busy with lately.

We’ve been using Logstash for quite a while now, and one of the annoyances I’ve had is that with the default configuration we threw together we only got second resolution on our timestamps. 99% of the time this has been good enough for the simple things we’ve been trying to keep an eye on, but now and again it’s resulted trouble stitching together the exact sequence of events when trying to diagnose a problem.

Rsyslog is the primary tool we use to get data into Logstash in the first place. As we don’t have the luxury of using anything cloud oriented we need to care about our hardware too, and using syslog makes this very easy. Add to this how simple it is to get most applications to log via syslog too and it makes using it a no brainer.

Getting the high resolution timestamps into your rsyslog messages is actually really simple. Just make sure you have the following configuration option set in your rsyslog configuration:

$ActionForwardDefaultTemplate RSYSLOG_ForwardFormat