Syslogd, rsyslogd, and syslog-ng are the syslog daemon, or system log daemon. syslogd is the legacy syslog daemon, and rsyslog and syslog-ng are newer syslog daemon that have enhancements over syslogd. The journal is used on some Linux distributions instead of syslog to handle the logging of events.

When a service has an event or message it would like to log to a log file, the service needs to have a way of knowing what file the message should be written to. Syslog is used to determine the file a message should be written to. The format of the /etc/syslog.conf or /etc/rsyslog.conf file is facility.priority action. For example, you may have a line in the syslog.conf file mail.* /var/log/maillog. Mail is the facility, * is the priority, and /var/log/maillog is the action.

mail.*    /var/log/maillog

Following is a typical syslog.conf file. When two or more facilities are used, the facilities are separated by a comma. When two or more priorities are used, the priorities are separated by a semi-colon.

In this example, kern (kernal) events at any priority are sent to /dev/console. If /dev/console is set to /dev/tty1, then all kernel events will appear on /dev/tty1.

Also in this example, any type of event at level emergency will be display on every TTY and PTS virtual console.

*.info;mail.none;authpriv.none;cron.none  /var/log/messages
*.emerg                                   *
kern.*                                    /dev/console
authpriv.*                                /var/log/secure
mail.*                                    /var/log/maillog
cron.*                                    /var/log/cron
local7.*                                  /var/log/boot.log
uucp,news.crit                            /var/log/spooler

• Line 1 log anything level info or higher to /var/log/messages, except mail, authpriv, and cron events.
• Line 2 sends everyone emergency events
• Line 3 logs kernel events for any priority to /dev/console
• Line 4 logs security and authorization events for any priority to /var/log/secure
• Line 5 logs mail events for any priority to /var/log/maillog
• Line 6 logs cron events for any priority to /var/log/cron
• Line 7 logs boot events for any priority to /var/log/boot.log
• Line 8 logs Unix to Unix copy program (uucp) events and news errors level critical or higher to /var/log/spooler

Following are common facilities:

• authpriv: security and authorization messages
• cron: cron daemon messages
• daemon: various system daemon messages, typically used for services that do not have a facility, such as DHCP, DNS, and NTP, just to name a few
• kern: kernel messages
• lpr: printing messages
• mail: mail system messages
• news: news daemon messages
• syslog: syslog messages
• user: user level messages
• uucp: Unix to Unix copy program daemon messages
• local0 through local7: locally defined application messages
• *: every facility

Following are common priorities. 

• debug: debugging information (lowest priority)
• info: information
• notice: noteworthy, but not necessary implicit of a problem
• warning: imply a possible problem
• err: error message
• crit: critical problem
• alert: very critical problem (high priority than crit)
• emerg: emergency message (highest priority)
• *: every priority

Typically, the action will be the absolute path to a file. However, the action can also be the * character. The * character will send a text message to the terminal of all users logged into the machine. The * character is typically only used for emergency messages.

*.emerg      *

When a service has an event or message it would like to log to a log file, the service will give the message one of the priorities. Syslog uses at or above. For example, uucp and news messages crit and above will be written to /var/log/spooler. This means that uucp and news messages err and below will not be written to /var/log/spooler. Instead, uucp and news messages err and below will be written to /var/log/messages.

uucp,news.crit    /var/log/spooler

If an equal sign is used, only messages at the priority will be written to the specified log file. For example, you could log critical mail messages to /var/log/maillog_critical.

mail.=crit    /var/log/maillog_critical

An exclamation point reverses at or above to below. For example, you could write cron messages below err to /var/log/cron_low_priority.

cron.!err   /var/log/cron_low_priority

The @ character can be used to write log events to a remote machine. For example, you could write cron messages to a machine with DNS name log.example.com.

cron.*   @log.example.com