Amazon OpenSearch Ingestion vs syslog-ng

Amazon OpenSearch Ingestion is a managed, serverless service that streams logs, metrics, and traces to OpenSearch Service domains or OpenSearch Serverless collections. Each pipeline has a source, optional ordered processors, and one or more sinks, including another pipeline as a sink. Processing can filter, enrich, transform, normalize, aggregate, and route structured or unstructured data, including textual, numerical, and geospatial content. AWS automatically scales ingestion workloads and manages installation, patching, version upgrades, continuous monitoring, and repair. Users define YAML pipelines through the AWS Console or CLI, set minimum and maximum ingestion OCU capacity, or pause a pipeline; paused pipelines consume no OCUs. Billing is hourly with per-minute granularity for allocated OCUs, with one OCU providing 15 GB RAM and 2 vCPU. Private connectivity is available through VPC access and PrivateLink, or pipelines can use the public internet. Redaction, obfuscation, conditional routing, and a stated 99.9% availability SLA are included.

syslog-ng collects infrastructure logs, processes them, and routes or stores them for analysis. Its free Open Source Edition can collect, parse, classify, rewrite, and correlate logs before sending them to analysis tools or storing them. Premium Edition adds filtering and real-time pattern correlation to reduce and normalize log data, plus disk buffering, client-side failover, and application-layer acknowledgements. It supports TLS-encrypted transfer and encrypted log storage with X.509 certificates for mutual authentication. Store Box offers access-controlled search and custom reports that can help with compliance work. Listed destinations include Elasticsearch, Hadoop, Kafka, MongoDB, SQL databases, Redis, Splunk, and SIEM tools. Premium licensing is based on Log Source Hosts, with annual support available; Store Box licensing depends on Log Source Hosts and hardware configuration. Open Source Edition is GPL/LGPL licensed and community supported. Commercial customers can access certified engineers and support services; Premium Edition and Store Box offer free trials.