Software to send windows notification eventlogs to linux syslog server and encode to utf8

Question

I am trying to setup a windows 2008 server so it's able to send the eventlog messages to an syslog-ng server running linux. I'd prefer something native but I guess it won't be possible.

UPDATE The first answer recommended to use snare, so far it's the best solution I found, totally painless to setup, and in less than five minutes I've logs to my syslog-ng server. The only drawaback (not snare fault) was that the logs are sent in windows-1252 charset encoding. So I was not able to tail -f them unless I change the charset somehow. If you are using syslog-ng this can be easily solved by creating a new source, in my case:

source src_win {
        udp(
                ip("192.168.1.200")
                port(514)
                encoding("WINDOWS-1252"));
};

After this (and assigning the new source to the right place) you will able to see your windows logs properly.

Old content

Looking around I've found a couple of solutions pointed by this page: http://www.itbuzzer.net/corner/2008/10/how-to-send-windows-events-to-syslog.asp

• Syslog agent (http://www.syslogserver.com/syslogagent.html): This was the easyest choice, but the last update is from 2008
• eventlog-to-syslog (http://code.google.com/p/eventlog-to-syslog/): It seems to be the most updated and recently has moved to code.google.com from the Purdue University
• ntsyslog (http://ntsyslog.sourceforge.net/): Doesn't run on windows 2008server so I can't use that one.

Does anyone have experience with any of those or something else?

Answer 1

I use Snare.

Snare for Windows is a Windows NT, Windows 2000, Windows XP, and Windows 2003 compatible service that interacts with the underlying Windows Eventlog subsystem to facilitate remote, real-time transfer of event log information. Snare for Windows also support 64 bit versions of Windows (X64 and IA64).

Snare for Windows Vista is a Windows 2008, Vista and Windows 7 compatible service that interacts with the underlying "Crimson" Eventlog subsystem to facilitate remote, real-time transfer of event log information. Snare for Windows Vista also support 64 bit versions of Windows (X64).

Snare for Windows and Windows Vista are free software (freeware), released under the terms of the GNU Public Licence (GPL).

Answer 2

nxlog is an open-source solution which can do what you need using the im_mseventlog or im_msvistalog modules. There is charset conversion support so you can forward in utf-8 or another codepage.

Answer 3

You might also consider looking at the most current incarnation of the eventlog-to-syslog project out there.

I'm looking at building a log server to centralize and process all the windows and linux logs in my environment and am looking at both that and snare. I'm leaning towards eventlog-to-syslog as it's supposedly a little bit lighter than snare and I'm hampered as my environment is already a somewhat overloaded vmware environment.

Not that I don't think snare is an excellent solution, I just like people to have multiple options.