[Oisf-users] JSON output for alerts

[Victor Julien]

On 03/12/2013 02:37 PM, Brian Rectanus wrote:
> On Tuesday, March 12, 2013 at 4:06 AM, Victor Julien wrote:
>> On 03/11/2013 03:29 PM, Brian Rectanus wrote:
>>> On Thu, Mar 7, 2013 at 5:48 AM, Victor Julien <lists at inliniac.net> wrote:
>>>> On 03/07/2013 12:46 PM, Aaron Nikula wrote:
>>>>> All,
>>>>>
>>>>> I have been experimenting with the /files/-/json/./log /output and I
>>>>> like it a lot. I was wondering if I could also output regular alerts to
>>>>> a JSON format? If not, are there any plans to implement that feature?
>>>>
>>>> I'd like to do that as well. Have been thinking about adding this as an
>>>> option to all outputs. Care to open a feature ticket?
>>>
>>> FYI, take a look at yajl lib for JSON if your looking for a lib.
>>> Seems pretty nice and very light. We are using it in ironbee now.
>>>
>>> http://lloyd.github.com/yajl/
>>
>> Thanks Brian.
>>
>> We already use libjansson for the unix socket protocol, so using this
>> would require some refactoring. Do you think this yajl will bring big
>> benefits over libjansson?
> 
> Depends on what you use it for. Yajl allows for stream based parsing
> directly into your own structures. No need to parse everything into a
> tree of nodes and then read through that. So, I think yajl is more
> efficiently using resources, but at the cost of some extra code
> complexity sue to having to write callbacks for each node type. We
> needed the streaming parser for potentially large json structures coming
> in chunks. Yajl is nice, but I think libjannson is as well. They just
> solve different needs. For instance you could build libjannson on top of
> yajl. 

The only performance critical use we have is generating JSON records,
not parsing them. The unix socket code that parses JSON records is async
and we expect low volume. Otherwise we will be using it to generate
output based on alerts, events. So on the output side it is critical
that it's fast.

-- 
---------------------------------------------
Victor Julien
http://www.inliniac.net/
PGP: http://www.inliniac.net/victorjulien.asc
---------------------------------------------