Unifi syslog with Alloy and Grafana Cloud

Recently, I decided I wanted to keep syslog entries for all of my Unifi devices somewhere instead of doing nothing with them. However, I’m already pushing up a lot of my network’s stuff to Grafana Cloud already because I’m a Loki and Grafana shill. So I decided to set up Unifi to log its stuff over syslog to Alloy.

Hang on though, Promtail only lets you log to syslog with a newer format than what Unifi devices send. Docs as a source for that claim.

The messages must be compliant with the RFC5424 format.

This is a problem, because Unifi devices don’t send in RFC5424, they send in RFC3164 instead. That’s an issue. However, if we put an ‘intermediary’ between the two and use some of Alloy’s loki.process nodes, we can sort of hack this together.

First off, we’ll install syslog-ng. It provides us the ability to parse RFC3164 inbound logs, which makes this process pretty simple. We’ll slap this in its configuration:

source udp { syslog(ip(0.0.0.0) port(514) transport("udp")); };
destination syslog_in { file("/var/log/syslog-in"); };
log { source(udp); destination(syslog_in); };

This will open a listener on 0.0.0.0:514 over UDP, which we can then point the Unifi Controller at for logging.

Once we’ve done that, the logs will end up in /var/log/syslog-in, which we can then read and parse with Alloy.

Let’s look at our Alloy config for this:

loki.process "syslog" {
  stage.regex {
    expression = `(?P<ts>[A-Z][a-z][a-z]\s{1,2}\d{1,2}\s\d{2}[:]\d{2}[:]\d{2})\s(?P<host>[\w][\w\d\.@-]*)\s(?P<log>.*)$`
  }

  stage.labels {
    values = { hostname = "host" }
  }

  stage.timestamp {
    source = "ts"
    format = "Jan _2 15:04:05"
  }

  stage.output {
    source = "log"
  }

  forward_to = [gcloud.stack.default.logs]
}

loki.source.file "syslog" {
  targets = [
    { __path__ = "/var/log/syslog-in", job = "syslog" },
  ]
  forward_to = [loki.process.syslog.receiver]
}

This configuration will go through, read /var/log/syslog-in, set job="syslog" as a label, then do some processing to pull out the relevant info we need.

We parse the log line with a regex query that works for parsing RFC3164 lines, then read the host capture group in as the hostname label on the log line, and finally parse the timestamp value from the ts capture group with the relevant Go time format string.

Finally, we remove everything except the actual log itself (stripping out the timestamp and hostname from the lines) and forward to Grafana Cloud.

This is a hacky way around an annoying problem, but it works for me, and hopefully helps some people do what I was trying to sort out.

I’ve got this all configured in NixOS, so here’s that configuration if you want to steal it. default.nix has the main configuration (including setting up syslog-ng), and config.alloy has the syslog Alloy config shown above.