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This is all well and good if you want to, and can, spend time up front figuring out how to parse each and every log line format which might appear in syslog so you can drop it in your structured store.

The alternative is to leave everything unstructured, and understand the formats minimally and lazily. Laziness is a virtue, right?

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Why would I need to be able to parse everything up front? Taking the syslog example, that has a commonly understood format. As a default case, I can just split the parts and have structured data (esp. with RFC5424, where structured data is part of the protocol to begin with).

Then, I can add further parsers for the MESSAGE part whenever I feel like it, or whenever there is need. I don't need that up front.

Because in my experience, the interesting stuff isn't in the syslog metadata. It's in the message part. Until you add that further parser, you're grepping.

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