Extract text from Suricata log files (GZL)
To convert GZL logs to another format, you need Suricata or other Compressed software.
To convert other file formats to the "Gzipped Event Log" file type, you need software like Suricata or a similar tool.
The .GZL file is a gzipped event log file created by Suricata, a high-performance Network IDS, IPS, and Network Security Monitoring engine. Internally, it uses the standard GZIP compression algorithm to store massive volumes of network event data, typically originally formatted as JSON (like eve.json).
System administrators and security analysts use software like Filebeat or standard GNU Gzip tools to process these files. You can read more about Suricata on its Wikipedia page.
The main disadvantage of the .GZL format is that it is a compressed binary file. You cannot open it directly in standard text editors or grep through it without decompressing it first. This creates an annoying extra step during urgent incident response.
To analyze the data, you need to convert or extract the .GZL file into a plain JSON, LOG, or TXT file. Decompressing the file restores the original text without any data loss, but the resulting uncompressed file size can be substantially larger, quickly eating up disk space.
Because this file uses a specialized extension instead of the standard GZ, many basic text readers and log management tools fail to automatically recognize it. Just drag and drop your file to convert.guru to identify the format, view it, and convert it when possible. Since our analysis detects the underlying GZIP format embedded in the file, viewing or extracting the text content is often still possible.
Convert.Guru analyzes your GZL file, detects the exact format, and lets you read the text inside.
If you want to convert GZL file to CSV, JSON, XML, YAML, YML, TOML, INI, CFG, CONF, DAT, DB or SQL, you can use Suricata or similar software from the "Compressed Network Security Logs" category. In the File menu, look for Save As… or Export….
To convert DBF, XML, SQLITE, XLSX, SQL, TSV, ACCDB, YAML, MDB, CSV, ODS or JSON files to GZL, try Suricata or another comparable tool in the "Compressed Network Security Logs" category.
The history of Convert.Guru began over 25 years ago in California with Tom Simondi’s file-format database. A former contributor to Space Shuttle development and a software pioneer of the 1980s, Simondi established a trusted resource for file type analysis that was even referenced by Microsoft Windows XP. Today, we use modern technology to process and convert thousands of file formats while continually improving our GZL converter.