Does Pivotal Support Firehose-to-Syslog?

Products

• VMware Tanzu Application Service for VMs

Issue/Introduction

This article applies to the following environment:
Pivotal Cloud Foundry® 1.10 and below

The firehose-to-syslog component is often used to redirect application logs (Not platform logs) and metrics from the Loggregator Firehose to a customer run syslog aggregation service (Ex: Splunk or ELK). This redirects all of the logs at once, rather than having to add syslog drains for every application, and it also allows a customer to search metrics through the same UI through which they search logs.

Look up the GitHub page from Open Source Cloud Foundry documentation for the resources on firehose-to-syslog.

Resolution

Options:

To confirm if the platform logging components are working properly, you can use the Firehose Plugin for CF CLI. This plugin connects to the Loggregator Firehose and streams logs and metrics. If the plugin is capable of streaming logs and metrics then all downstream platform components are working properly and any issues would be upstream in the firehose-to-syslog component or the customer's syslog aggregator system.

Pivotal Engineering is working on a supported solution for sending logs and metrics to a syslog service, with initial support being targeted for 1.11. This is tentative and subject to change. There is also no guarantee that initial support will have a feature parity with firehose-to-syslog.

 

The firehose-to-syslog component is written by the Open Source Cloud Foundry community. Pivotal Cloud Foundry does not have this feature built-in yet, therefore, Pivotal Support is not committing any troubleshooting for this feature right now. Because there is no supported alternative at this time, Pivotal Support might provide a minimal amount of assistance with the application. This includes troubleshooting the flow of logs to confirm that there are no problems with the platform logging components and basic usage and configuration. Pivotal Support has no ability to assist with resolving bugs or security issues in firehose-to-syslog as of now.

Impact

The firehose-to-syslog software is not supported by Pivotal as of today. By choosing to use this, the customer is acknowledging the risk of using the unsupported software.

Additional Information