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Note: The following is an excerpt from the official IETF RFC. It is provided here as a convenience and is not authoritative. Refer to the original document as the authoritative reference.

This document describes a layered architecture for syslog. The goal of this architecture is to separate message content from message transport while enabling easy extensibility for each layer.

This document describes the standard format for syslog messages and outlines the concept of transport mappings. It also describes structured data elements, which can be used to transmit easily parseable, structured information, and allows for vendor extensions.

This document does not describe any storage format for syslog messages. It is beyond of the scope of the syslog protocol and is unnecessary for system interoperability.

This document has been written with the original design goals for traditional syslog in mind. The need for a new layered specification has arisen because standardization efforts for reliable and secure syslog extensions suffer from the lack of a Standards-Track and transport-independent RFC. Without this document, each other standard would need to define its own syslog packet format and transport mechanism, which over time will introduce subtle compatibility issues. This document tries to provide a foundation that syslog extensions can build on. This layered architecture approach also provides a solid basis that allows code to be written once for each syslog feature instead of once for each transport.

This document obsoletes RFC 3164, which is an Informational document describing some implementations found in the field. ~~DISCUSSION:on|Outstanding Issues~~ ~~DISCUSSION:off~~