When comparing Kafka vs Rsyslog, the Slant community recommends Kafka for most people. In the question“What are the best log management, aggregation & monitoring tools?” Kafka is ranked 8th while Rsyslog is ranked 9th. The most important reason people chose Kafka is:
Kafka is optimized for supporting a huge number of users.
Specs
Ranked in these QuestionsQuestion Ranking
Pros
Pro Optimized for performance
Kafka is optimized for supporting a huge number of users.
Pro Native mirroring support
Kafka has native support for mirroring.
Pro Native compression support
Kafka has native support for compression.
Pro Free and Open Source
Rsyslog is a free and open source tool.
Cons
Con Java is a resource hog
Java is a resource hog, making this far too slow unless you have money to throw at multiple servers with 1/2TB of ram.
Con Need Zookeeper
Kafka can only work with Zookeeper
Con Difficult to configure
The config is not user friendly at all compared to syslog-ng
Con Not spread to many platforms
Rsyslog is only available for Linux and Solaris.