# Wowza logging via rsyslog?
**URL:** https://community.wowza.com/t/wowza-logging-via-rsyslog/37882
**Category:** Wowza Streaming Engine
**Tags:** server-administration
**Created:** [April 2, 2012, 1:33pm UTC](https://community.wowza.com/t/wowza-logging-via-rsyslog/37882 "2012-04-02T13:33:23Z")
**Posts on this page:** 5
**Page:** 1
### Author:  [@Daniel\_Mahoney1](https://community.wowza.com/u/Daniel_Mahoney1)
#### Post date: [April 2, 2012, 1:33pm UTC](https://community.wowza.com/t/wowza-logging-via-rsyslog/37882/1 "2012-04-02T13:33:23Z")
Has anyone had any success getting Wowza (therefor log4j) to send messages to a remote logging server? We generally run multiple worker instances in a load balanced configuration, killing off unneeded workers when load drops off, and having to move their log files to a central point before terminating gets to be quite a chore. I’m thinking it would be a lot more convenient to have all workers log to a central rsyslogd machine. Unfortunately there doesn’t seem to be a lot of information available on doing this.
Has anybody implemented this solution before? If so, how did you go about making it work?
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### Author:  [@Richard\_Lanham](https://community.wowza.com/u/Richard_Lanham)
#### Post date: [April 2, 2012, 7:37pm UTC](https://community.wowza.com/t/wowza-logging-via-rsyslog/37882/2 "2012-04-02T19:37:36Z")
The /conf/log4j.properties file has a commented out UDP appender. I don’t have any experience with it, however
Richard
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### Author:  [@Richard\_Lanham](https://community.wowza.com/u/Richard_Lanham)
#### Post date: [April 20, 2012, 2:44pm UTC](https://community.wowza.com/t/wowza-logging-via-rsyslog/37882/3 "2012-04-20T14:44:30Z")
Very cool. Thank you for this great howto write-up. I will try it out.
Richard
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### Author:  [@Daniel\_Mahoney1](https://community.wowza.com/u/Daniel_Mahoney1)
#### Post date: [April 20, 2012, 8:35am UTC](https://community.wowza.com/t/wowza-logging-via-rsyslog/37882/4 "2012-04-20T08:35:15Z")
That would work, but since we bill customers based upon our log contents I really was looking for a solution that would use TCP.
The solution I finally developed was to use rsyslog. I designated one of my lightly-loaded EC2 instances to be by rsyslog server, and in it’s rsyslog.conf I included:
$ModLoad imtcp # loads the tcp module
$InputTCPServerRun 514 # defines what port to listen on
$EscapeControlCharactersOnReceive off # Prevents rsyslog from turning tab into #011
$template WowzaFormat,"%TIMESTAMP% %fromhost-ip% %syslogtag%%msg:::sp-if-no-1st-sp%%msg:::drop-last-lf%\n" # Defines log line format
$ActionFileDefaultTemplate WowzaFormat
local1.\* /var/log/wowza.log # Specifies that all messages for facility “local1” get written to wowza log file
Then on my worker instances I set up the rsyslog.conf with:
$InputFileName /usr/local/WowzaMediaServer/logs/wowzamediaserver\_access.log
$InputFileTag wowzaAccess:
$InputFileStateFile statefile\_access
#$InputFileSeverity info
$InputFileFacility local1
$InputRunFileMonitor
local1.\* @@
#$ActionFileDefaultTemplate RSYSLOG\_TraditionalFileFormat
$template WowzaFormat,"%TIMESTAMP% %fromhost-ip% %syslogtag%%msg:::sp-if-no-1st-sp%%msg:::drop-last-lf%\n"
$ActionFileDefaultTemplate WowzaFormat
This setup has been working well for us for a couple of weeks now. I describe the setup process in a little more detail in my blog ( [http://www.streemit.net/2012/04/20/remote-logging-for-wowza/](http://www.streemit.net/2012/04/20/remote-logging-for-wowza/)) but the basic info included here should provide enough to get you started if you find that you need to centralize your Wowza logs too.
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### Author:  [@Rob\_Burton](https://community.wowza.com/u/Rob_Burton)
#### Post date: [October 17, 2017, 11:03pm UTC](https://community.wowza.com/t/wowza-logging-via-rsyslog/37882/5 "2017-10-17T23:03:35Z")
You could try NXLog instead of rsyslog, here’s a quick comparison about why:
[https://nxlog.co/products/nxlog-community-edition/why](https://nxlog.co/products/nxlog-community-edition/why)