JSON/CEE Structured Content Extraction Module (mmjsonparse)

Module Name: mmjsonparse
Author: Rainer Gerhards <rgerhards@adiscon.com>
Available since: 6.6.0

Purpose

This module provides support for parsing structured log messages that follow the CEE/lumberjack spec. The so-called “CEE cookie” is checked and, if present, the JSON-encoded structured message content is parsed. The properties are then available as original message properties.

As a convenience, mmjsonparse will produce a valid CEE/lumberjack log message if passed a message without the CEE cookie. A JSON structure will be created and the “msg” field will be the only field and it will contain the message. Note that in this case, mmjsonparse will nonetheless return that the JSON parsing has failed.

The “CEE cookie” is the character squence “@cee:” which must prepend the actual JSON. Note that the JSON must be valid and MUST NOT be followed by any non-JSON message. If either of these conditions is not true, mmjsonparse will not parse the associated JSON. This is based on the cookie definition used in CEE/project lumberjack and is meant to aid against an erroneous detection of a message as being CEE where it is not.

This also means that mmjsonparse currently is NOT a generic JSON parser that picks up JSON from whereever it may occur in the message. This is intentional, but future versions may support config parameters to relax the format requirements.

Notable Features

Configuration Parameters

Note

Parameter names are case-insensitive.

Action Parameters

useRawMsg

type default mandatory obsolete legacy directive
binary off no none

Specifies if the raw message should be used for normalization (on) or just the MSG part of the message (off).

container

type default mandatory obsolete legacy directive
string $! no none

Specifies the JSON container (path) under which parsed elements should be placed. By default, all parsed properties are merged into root of message properties. You can place them under a subtree, instead. You can place them in local variables, also, by setting path=”$.”.

Check parsing result

You can check whether rsyslogd was able to successfully parse the message by reading the $parsesuccess variable :

action(type="mmjsonparse")
if $parsesuccess == "OK" then {
   action(type="omfile" File="/tmp/output")
}
else if $parsesuccess == "FAIL" then {
   action(type="omfile" File="/tmp/parsing_failure")
}

Examples

Apply default normalization

This activates the module and applies normalization to all messages.

module(load="mmjsonparse")
action(type="mmjsonparse")