Speaker Interview: Peter Czanik

Balabit's Peter Czanik will be giving a talk on "syslog-ng: From Raw Data to Big Data" on SCALE Sunday at 3. The SCALE Team caught up with Peter to ask him about his presentation.

Q: Could you please introduce yourself and tell us a little about your background?

A: I am Peter Czanik, community manager at Balabit, best known in the open source community for syslog-ng. I work with different Linux distributions and FreeBSD to keep syslog-ng and related packages up-to-date, help syslog-ng users when they get stuck with a problem or need to report a bug. At last, but not least I also advocate syslog-ng and talk about it at conferences, LUG events, and talk as much as I can with syslog-ng users to learn how they use syslog-ng and what they would like to see in syslog-ng next. Before working on syslog-ng I had a similar job at a company creating PowerPC machines. Non-x86 architectures are now a hobby project for me: I have some PowerPC, ARM and now even a MIPS machine at home to tweak when I have some free time.

Q: You're giving a talk on "syslog-ng: From Raw Data to Big Data." Without tipping your hand on the actual talk, can you give us an idea of what we might expect?

A: Collection of system log messages to a central location is not the main feature of syslog-ng any more. It can also collect application logs in many different ways, parse messages for important information, anonymize sensitive data, enrich, reformat and finally filter messages. All these make syslog-ng a very useful element of a Big Data infrastructure, as logs can be sent directly to Hadoop, Elasticsearch or Kafka.

Q: Is this your first visit to SCALE? If so, what are your expectations? If not, can you give us your impressions of the event?

A: It is my second visit to SCALE, meaning that the first event was a very good experience. As I have spent most of my time at the syslog-ng booth, I did not have much chance to visit presentations. On the other hand I had many interesting discussions with syslog-ng users at the booth and I am looking forward to meeting our users this year too.

SCALE Team interview by Larry Cafiero