Yaml is the most common reasonably suitable format for things that look like config files. It's familiar to more developers than nginx config, therefore we hope more people can contribute.
> How to set-up log collector? For example I need to collect logs from several instances. Could not find in cookbook.
Did you look at the tutorial? https://github.com/onemorecloud/dendrite/blob/master/tutoria...
> How do you separate logs for different hosts/applications?
Right now, the output map has a couple automatically inserted keys for hostname, shipping timestamp, and the name of the application. This isn't terribly well-documented.
> How do you ship logs? UDP? TCP? TLS?
Yes ;)
> How is this compared vs Logstash?
Dendrite isn't trying to be Logstash. I'd like dendrite to be the agent you use with logstash, greylog, papertrail, or whatever. I think the agnostic nature of dendrite will be a big win, as dev/ops people can persist their data to multiple stores, or swap out stores more easily. The application we wrote Dendrite for currently persists logs to three different stores.