How to use rsyslog and Apache Kafka
===================================

Starting with version 8.7.0, rsyslog comes with an output module named
“omkafka”, allowing to publish log messages to an Apache Kafka message broker.

Apache Kafka isn't part of the Debian archive, and documenting how to set it up
is out of the scope of this document. Fortunately, setting up a single-node
Kafka service is quite easy. The following instructions should be enough to get
started: https://kafka.apache.org/documentation.html#quickstart

At this point, you'll have to alter your rsyslog configuration, typically by
adding the following lines to rsyslog.conf (or to a separate files such as
/etc/rsyslog.d/kafka.conf, which will be included by the main config file):

 module(load="omkafka")
 *.* action(type="omkafka" topic="test")

Don't forget to restart the rsyslogd daemon, and make sure the “topic”
parameter matches one of the topics in Kafka. You should then be able to start
consuming the logs stored in Kafka with the consumer of your choice. A trivial
consumer comes with the Kafka server installation.

The full configuration details of this module, are found in the following file
(which is part of the rsyslog-doc package):
/usr/share/doc/rsyslog-doc/html/configuration/modules/omkafka.html