Why are events ingested using the journald modular input truncated at 4088 bytes?

chris_barrett — Fri, 04 Nov 2022 16:30:28 GMT

I'm pulling in events from the journal of a number of Linux hosts using the journald modular input.

I'm seeing truncated events every so often and, when I look at the length of _raw, I see that it's always 4088 bytes.

The man page for journalctl (https://www.freedesktop.org/software/systemd/man/journalctl.html) says that when events are outputted using JSON format, that "Fields larger than 4096 bytes are encoded as null values. (This may be turned off by passing --all, but be aware that this may allocate overly long JSON objects.)"

I'm presuming that that's what happening with the truncated events that I'm seeing. Is anyone aware of a way around this? I can't see any configuration setting associated with the journald modular input that would let me enable the '--all' flag.

FWIW, I'm running Splunk Enterprise 9.0.2

topic Why are events ingested using the journald modular input truncated at 4088 bytes? in Getting Data In

Why are events ingested using the journald modular input truncated at 4088 bytes?