Replacing rsyslog with syslog-ng on RHEL 6.5

So...I had a piece of monitoring software that didn't play nice with the RHEL default rsyslog for log collection. The software was developed to only work with syslog-ng. I'll be going over the steps that I took, that worked for me, in replacing rsyslog with syslog-ng. I would imagine that these same steps should work for any Linux system similar to RHEL (Fedora, CentOS, etc.). For others (like Debein based distributions), I would need to look into that (coming in a future update to this post).

First, remove rsyslog. You will need to keep the dependencies as they will be needed for syslog-ng:

sudo rpm -e --nodeps rsyslog

Next we will need to add the EPEL repository (more info can be found HERE):

wget http://download.fedoraproject.org/pub/epel/6/i386/epel-release-6-8.noarch.rpm
sudo rpm -ivh epel-release-6-8.rpm
sudo yum repolist

That last command will list all the installed repositories. You are simply verifying that the EPEL package has been installed.

Now that we finished that, it's time to install syslog-ng:

sudo yum install --enablerepo=epel syslog-ng
sudo yum install --enablerepo=epel syslog-ng-libdbi

Next, we need to check the syslog-ng version:

syslog-ng -V

Now, in order to start syslog-ng, issue the following:

sudo /etc/init.d/syslog-ng start

In order to configure syslog-ng to fit your specific needs, you will need to edit the following config file:

/etc/syslog-ng/syslog-ng.conf 

After making any edits to the config file, you will need to restart the service. Additionally, depending on what you will be monitoring, or the application that you will be using to collect the log files, you might need to add a rule in IPTables for the outbound connection.

That should be about it. Outside of the config and firewall changes you should be good to go with syslog-ng for log collections.

P.S. don't forget to check any internal router/firewall to make sure the port is open between your Linux system and the log collection system.