Mergers

Mergers are the output counterpart of message splitters.

Mergers wrap individual messages so that they can be eventually split when received over a stream.

For example, when using the GELF output format:

• You probably want a line feed (\n) after each message when displaying them (Debug Output)
• You probably want a NUL byte (\0) after each message when sending GELF data to Graylog
• You probably want the raw, unchanged GELF object to be sent to Kafka
• You may want each message to be prefixed by its length in order to send these data to a RFC 6587 compliant syslog daemon

Furthermore, when using a binary format such as Cap'n Proto, you probably do not want anything to be done to the raw serialized data.

This can be controlled by the framing parameter of the [output] section:

[output]
framing = "noop"

noop is a passthrough. It doesn't alter the serialized data.

[output]
framing = "line"

line adds a line feed (\n) after each entry.

[output]
framing = "nul"

nul adds a NUL byte (\0) after each entry.

[output]
framing = "syslen"

syslen prepends the message length, as documented in RFC 6587.