Change time zone for syslog messages in syslog-ng |

When sending syslog packets to a remote server the time-zone of the current server may lead to problems because the syslog-ng program sets the time-zone with offset number according to the GMT. The remote server, especially if not a syslog-ng one, may interpret the offset as an offset to the UTC (Coordinated Universal Time), which leads times with an hour into the future.

Note, this whole problem is because of the Daylight saving time and there are almost 6 months when the GMT is not equal to the UTC and it is an hour ahead. Probably it is not a good idea to offset according to the GMT, because of the Daylight saving time during the summer, but this is on the syslog-ng development side.
There is one option time-zone(“[time_zone_string]”), which allows to change the time-zone of the destination packets. To avoid misinterprets of the date and time in the message packets the best way is to use it with UTC, so the local system will do the all necessary to convert the local time to UTC properly.
The configuration below uses time-zone(“[time_zone_string]”) from the current local time to UTC, because the current local time zone is EEST (Eastern European Summer Time), which 3 hours ahead of UTC during the summer period and 2 during winter (Eastern European Time – EET).

Relay the local web server logs from the local UDP port to the remote server using reliable TCP connection and changing the local time to UTC of the packets.

#NGINX - web logs
source udp_local {
    network(ip(127.0.0.1) port(514) transport("udp") so_rcvbuf(67108864) log_fetch_limit(1000) max-connections(1000) log-iw-size(1000000));
};

filter filter_nginx_access_log { program(nginx); };
destination d_tcp_syslog {
  syslog("10.10.10.10"
         port(10514) transport("tcp") disk-buffer(mem-buf-length(10000) mem-buf-size(128M) disk-buf-size(1024M) reliable(yes) dir("/var/lib/syslog-ng"))
         time_zone("UTC")
  );
};
log { source(udp_local); filter(filter_nginx_access_log); destination(d_tcp_syslog); };
#NGINX-end

the time_zone(“UTC”) in destination rule will ensure the packets have proper time related to the local server’s time in UTC and the mistake of misinterpreted date time is unlikely on a remote server.
More articles with syslog-ng – https://ahelpme.com/tag/syslog-ng/.

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