Rainer Gerhards


Rainer Gerhards is a German software engineer, network engineer, and protocol designer best known for his Computer data logging work including Rsyslog and Reliable Event Logging Protocol. He began developing Rsyslog in 2004, to forward log messages in an Internet Protocol Network from UNIX and Unix-like computer systems. In 1988, Gerhards founded the company RG Informationssysteme, which was later rebranded as Adiscon GmbH in 1997.

Life and career

Gerhards was born in Geilenkirchen, Germany. In 1983 he started professional computing on Univac 1100 mainframes. He was appointed as the head of data center of Dörries GmbH where he introduced a company-wide PC network and was among the first in Germany to utilize Windows in larger-scale environments. In 1996, he started work on Computer data logging, and developing network and protocol software based on it.

Protocol Design

Gerhards focused on the IETF syslog standardization and authored four RFCs on syslog. He wrote the base RFC 5424, which describes the syslog protocol architecture and stack. As a board member of Mitre's CEE effort, he worked on standardizing event expression formats and providing interoperability between different logging systems.
He used his software projects as testbeds for IETF standardization including rsyslog for the development of RFC 5424, RFC 5425, and RFC 5426. He implemented RFC 3195, the syslog over RFC 3080 protocol. Later, Gerhards designed the Reliable Event Logging Protocol, and its predecessor Simple Event Transport Protocol.